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.

Doki Doki Literature Club! - Thoughts

To talk about Doki Doki Literature Club candidly is to spoil what makes it special. There's no practical way around that; the best advice one can give to a curious onlooker is to "go in blind." Even starting the game reveals a glimpse into DDLC's secret, with text boxes popping up to ward away the squeamish. It's a game that can and should be played without a guide, a visual novel that's strikingly competent with its writing and themes. If you have a penchant for the strange or unnerving, give it a chance—DDLC may be slow and unremarkable at the start, but I promise it'll unfold into an experience you won't soon forget.

[spoilers ahead]

Boy, what a journey! All I knew before diving into Doki Doki Literature Club was that it was supposed to be "scary", but I wasn't quite sure what that entailed. Was it a jumpscare game like Five Nights at Freddy's? Solemnly spooky like Silent Hill? Or a discordant, gut-wrenching spiral to hell like Saya No Uta? Astonishingly it's kind of a mix of all three—with plenty of humor slathered on top for levity! There are definitely some pitch black moments to jolt you from your seat (like Sayori and Yuri's deaths), but DDLC is a surprisingly funny game that prefers to amuse you more than scare your pants off. Yuri's crazy eyes best exemplify this trait: they're an initially terrifying reveal that's fairly silly in retrospect, especially considering she's just a lovesick loon that's as attracted to you as she is paranoid of her own perversion.

The best part about Doki Doki Literature Club for me—hands down—was the game's numerous one-off surprises. Stuff like the weird pitch change in music, Monika's head popping up while writing a poem, the creeping dutch tilt as you talk with Yuri, the mouse cursor dragging back towards Monika's choice, your real name drop—there are a ton of fun moments DDLC uses once and then never again. Only after I finished it did I learn the game was furtively dropping mysterious files into its own folder, a great meta-touch that shows how committed Dan Salvato is to actualizing his world. And nothing symbolizes DDLC's ingenuity better than its crowning achievement: deleting Monika's character file.

Video games are a fascinating medium due to the fact that they (most often) require player participation in order to function properly. Stories don't simply solve themselves—you have to put in some legwork to see the end, even if campaigns nowadays guarantee you a safe passage on "story mode". But occasionally, a game will use the gameplay itself to make a thematic statement. Think of the borrowed strength at the end of Brothers, Undertale's genocide route requiring pure psychopathy from the player, and a handful of brilliant others that veer too closely to spoiler territory (like Kotaro Uchikoshi and Yoko Taro's works). Mechanics like these not only reinforce the narrative in an unexpected way, but are only possible in the interactive-driven medium of video games.

Doki Doki Literature Club joins these vaunted ranks by requiring you to manually delete the game's main antagonist off of your hard drive to reach its ending. It's perhaps the most brutal way a VN love interest has ever been rejected. The idea itself induces a double take, evolving from a suspicious "wait, could I?" to a full-throated gamble that risks destroying the executable. I like how the move echoes Monika's own actions too, treating her as she treated others—despite the timeless void arguably being the game's "happiest" end. And even after this betrayal from the player, Monika continues to love them, the remnants of her code irreversibly corrupting the game to save them from its soulless, affection-starved inhabitants.

What I love about this bittersweet closure is how it rehabilitates Monika back into being a sympathetic character. She's by far the most unsettling heroine of the lot, despite never engaging in anything outwardly "scary" the entire game (I adore Yuri, but she's definitely queen freak). And yet Monika's cool demeanor is precisely what makes her so chilling; beneath those calm emerald eyes is a manipulative, cruel, and cunning schemer with the detached patience of a mortician. She argues that she's above the others simply because she can see a world outside of the ones and zeroes, but she too falls prey to the player's infallible charm, programmed to love them even after being tossed into the recycle bin. The Portal-esque serenade at the ending credits paint her as a tragic figure—and in turn, can kindle a curious, Stockholm-like fondness in the player's heart. They might come to idolize Doki Doki's maladjusted cast just as they were idolized in turn, a Newton's cradle of unrequited love bound to spiral into obsession if left unchecked. DDLC is a visual novel that boldly suggests that sometimes, falling in love can be to the benefit of no one if it is not mutual.

And in those cases, it's simply better to leave and let be.

My feelings for Doki Doki Literature Club rose from a dry amusement to genuine curiosity as soon as the game presented me its first poem. I love the idea of learning about someone via their vulnerable art—but Doki Doki's girls weren't vulnerable as much as they were plainly disturbed. And while it was indeed a disturbing experience, it was also (quite literally) a doki-doki experience, full of tension, excitement, and genuine heart. It's a game clearly born of a love for both visual novels and horror, wanting to thrill you in its own quirky, special, deranged way. For as short as it was, Doki Doki Literature Club was a great ride, one that left me only slightly worried that Monika might still be stowed away on my computer somewhere, judging me for having Nekopara in my Steam library.

(it was part of a VN bundle!!!)

Super Cyborg - Thoughts

As fan-made spiritual successors to dormant franchises continue to spring up, it's been harder and harder to keep track of the notable ones. Thanks to one Shmup Junkie, Super Cyborg blipped onto my radar, prompting some playthroughs from me between the larger titles I'm chewing on. I had previously thought Blazing Chrome had given me all the Contra nostalgia I could ever ask for, but Super Cyborg is of a markedly different breed; whereas Blazing Chrome idolizes Contra Hard Corps, Super Cyborg (unsurprisingly) adores the older Super C. But something went wrong with its creation—Super Cyborg was submerged in a vat of acid, sloughing off the game's merciful exterior to expose its raw meat and bones. What survived the acid bath is one of the most difficult run'n'guns I've played to date, demanding a level of consistency, precision, and memorization more befitting of Ghosts 'n Goblins than Contra.

It bears repeating: Super Cyborg is as tough as diamond nails. Its "easy" difficulty is a gross misnomer; nothing about the game is easy, besides maybe its first stage. You'll likely hit a wall in the runner-infested cliffside of Stage 3, and then another in the claustrophobic guts of Stage 5, but nothing can prepare you for the final stage: a terrifying gauntlet of constant enemies, attacks from the rear, and a long elevator ride to an even longer final boss you'll have to learn inside and out. It's no joke—over half of your playtime will be spent inside this infested hellnest, where losing a single power-up induces a full stage reset. Seriously, just try to fight the final boss without the Spread gun and see if you can stay alive for 10 seconds.

The good news (if you choose to take it as such) is that easy teaches you everything you need to know to tackle normal. The bump up in difficulty only makes two adjustments: more popcorn foes and a ~33% increase in enemy health. While it makes the hard levels a bit harder (Stage 7's elevator is an even bigger pain in the ass), you don't really need to change any of your tactics or learn new boss attacks—just make sure to shoot behind yourself every now and then. Hard mode is an entirely different ballpark however, adding so many new projectiles and enemies into the mix that I nope'd out of it by Stage 3. I found the difficulties to be smartly balanced in the end, but I would've liked to see more differentiation in the stock of lives provided, as no matter which difficulty level you choose you only have 4 lives to see your mission through. A 7/5/3 life split for easy/normal/hard would've been preferable—or at the very least, midstage checkpoints for more than the last two levels.

If you've survived the crucible that was the NES era, you'll likely feel right at home here. Enemy spawns have to be memorized and safe spots located located safe spots through trial and error, but as long as you're down with that, Super Cyborg offers one hell of an experience. Everything here is spot on, from the controls to the fleshpunk visuals, from the stage design to the pulsing music pushing you forward. That's because Super Cyborg cribs its design straight from Super C: power-ups are largely the same, enemies fill similar roles, and most of the bullet sprites are borrowed from Konami's series of old—including the fuzzy red onion rings of Dethgerbis! There's plenty here to give Super Cyborg its own distinct flavor—like the grotesque, gaping human faces on its mangled enemies—but it's clear the game wouldn't exist in a world without Super C.

The last thing I wish the game had is some sort of stage select or boss rush, but frankly I'm happy it controls well and ditched having limited continues. I'm not sure I would've been able to handle getting booted back to the start every dozen deaths or so, especially since I popped the "100 deaths" achievement while clawing my way through the first half of Stage 7. I also don't like the game's unwavering reliance on conserving power-ups to survive (bosses are easier to beat on one life with a power-up than four without), but that's minor complaint in retrospect. Taken as a whole, Super Cyborg is an amazing package, especially for the price it goes on sale at—it's basically a must-play for classic Contra fans.

Like Ghouls 'n Ghosts, Super Cyborg doesn't feel nearly as insurmountable on replay... but that's because the stage layouts and power-up spawns have been burned into your brain, the timing of boss attacks etched into your phalangeal joints. As far as Contra clones go, I think Blazing Chrome continues to hold that jeweled crown, but Super Cyborg follows closely behind, touching its shadow. This love letter to Super C joins the ranks of AM2R and Mega Man Unlimited as a phenomenal fan-made sequel, not only grasping what made Contra so fun but replicating its style flawlessly. Super Cyborg a rad game—provided you can stomach the repeated beating of replaying a stage again and again and again until you finally master it.

Etrian Odyssey II: Heroes of Lagaard - Thoughts

For anyone that bounced off of the first Etrian Odyssey, I have some bad news: the second is unabashedly more of the same. Etrian Odyssey II carries over the same classes, same mapping system, custom levelling, item grinding, dungeon dimensions, story beats... hell, even the UI is basically copied over! Sequels typically offer the developer a chance to make their franchise more accommodating and mainstream, but Etrian Odyssey II laughs at the suggestion, doubling down on its exotic blend of labyrinthine madness. If punishing mechanics or obtuse progression has deterred you from delving deeper into labyrinth of Etria, then take heed: the sequel is just as harsh and baffling, if not more so.

But for anyone charmed by Etrian Odyssey's brave debut, then prepare for an even bigger, smarter, and better adventure.

The best way to think about Etrian Odyssey II in relation to its predecessor is to picture the change from Mega Man 1 to Mega Man 2. To an outsider, it'll appear as if you've paid full price for a sizable expansion at best and a shallow reskin at worst. But veterans of the first expedition will find a massive new adventure in a familiar-but-fresh universe—with some absolutely essential quality of life tweaks! The foremost among these is found in the shop: your party's equipment is displayed on the bottom screen, letting you swap out and sell gear much more quickly. Not only that, but you can finally see how many materials a new piece of equipment requires, giving you a firm grasp on which enemies to keep an eye out for. Those may not sound like huge upgrades, but in a 50+ hour RPG where story accounts for 5% of your play time (if that), speeding up the inventory management is a delectable godsend.

Etrian Odyssey II also gives the shoulder buttons a much-needed reassignment, allowing you to strafe while walking around the labyrinth floor. But where they really shine is in battle: tapping the L button initiates a sped-up auto-battle, reducing much of the game's tedious grinding to a one-button affair. A slight kink however, is that it overwrites any of the previous commands you've entered as soon as you begin automating combat. For instance: want your samurai to a unleash devastating AoE guaranteed to kill the enemy forces, while not caring about what the rest of the party does? Well a single push of the L button will send everyone into a melee frenzy, erasing all previous commands so that the party focuses on the enemy with the lowest health (which is often the least troublesome foe). Even with that hitch, auto-battling is a great addition to the series—but it's clear there's still room for improvement here.

The changes made to map making however, are a splendid surprise through and through. The number of available icons has more than doubled: there's now closed doors, a FOE tile, a new event tile, two more gather location tiles, and multiple arrow tiles to keep track of the game's numerous secret passageways. Floor tiles also come in two more colors now, letting you differentiate between floor hazards and FOE walkways at a glance. Like the shop upgrades, these ostensibly minor additions have a huge impact in the grand scheme of things, making the game categorically better just for having them. Another small touch I like is how none of the icons come with pre-written tags (like "use this for treasure" or "use this for passageways"), encouraging the player come up with their cartography system. It's a simple touch that makes the bottom screen feel that much more like a digitized parchment scroll you must carefully maintain.

Not everything in Etrian Odyssey II is sunshine and rainbows, but there's barely any complaints here that can't also be leveraged at the first game. Strategy is sadly frontloaded; the bulk of your gameplay decisions apply to character building, as battles out in the labyrinth are simple, straight-forward affairs. While I applauded the first game for its risk management challenges, I found that aspect a bit routine this second time around—you'll almost always return to town when you're out of mana, use a warp wire when cornered by a new FOE, and check every wall in the game for invaluable shortcuts. By far the biggest improvement the series should make going forward is to display more conditional information on characters and enemies, like defense up, provoke, attack down, etc. It's also hard to tell if a boss is immune to a status effect or simply resistant to it, a frustration my hexer shared as she gambled every turn trying to figure out which ailment was the "correct" one. More information provided to the player is very rarely a bad thing.

An unexpected misstep Etrian Odyssey II makes that the first entry (arguably) avoided, is that your journey begins needlessly overbearing. The start of these games is always the most precarious: you have terrible gear, barely any abilities, and the abilities you do have are junk for the first few levels. But Etrian Odyssey 2 adds a ruthless economy atop this, providing a pittance for the items gathered in the labyrinth while bankrupting you whenever you're in need of a resurrection—let alone a night's stay at the inn! It took hours of grinding just to make it past the first boss, a task made stupendously more difficult due to FOEs providing no experience whatsoever. Should FOEs have awarded less experience in the first game? Sure—but this is an overcorrection you'll be reeling from the entire journey, given the sheer abundance of patrolling FOEs that bar your path.

Despite all of these gripes, I still found Etrian Odyssey II to be a good game—or at the very least, an inarguable improvement over the first. Geomagnetic poles wisely replace healing pools, cutting down on the backtracking required while simultaneously allowing bosses to hit harder (as you're always a stone's throw away from their front door). Dungeon events are also far more common, going from a rarity in the first game to an infrequent-but-exciting occurrence that can bestow anything from healing, to items, to lore, to robbery-by-rodent. Lastly, Etrian Odyssey II feels more balanced than its predecessor... though I confess I'm unsure how much of that is due to my new party composition. Going from LPD/AM to LPR/HM, I found this game much harder than the first; hell, I didn't even try the last stratum due to how brutal my battles with the Colossus and final boss were, especially with my rare item stock all but depleted.

(Plus I looked at a youtube video of how much damage the true last boss dealt and proceeded to laugh as I hurriedly ejected the cart from my 3DS).

Etrian Odyssey II is an admirable follow-up to the first, although it does little to address the most off-putting characteristics of the series. But hey, that's fine! Etrian Odyssey II is a half-step in the right direction, offering a better, smoother experience through a gorgeously lethal fantasy labyrinth. It's paradoxically more punishing and less cruel than its predecessor, being easier to get through while demanding more time, thought, and focus from the player. Admittedly, I still have a smidge more fondness for the original entry, only because it made a stronger impression as my first JRPG dungeon crawler (I shall never forget the hell that was B18-20). Nevertheless, Etrian Odyssey II is the superior onboarding point for newcomers...

... but I have the sneaking suspicion it won't stay that way for long.

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Images obtained from: steamgriddb.com, dungeoncrawlers.org

Wizard of Legend - Thoughts

In the world of Wizard of Legend, mage battles are a lot closer to samurai duels than they are to the cover-based shootouts of Harry Potter. The game ranks as one of the fastest action titles I've ever played, requiring blisteringly precise inputs and split-second reactions in order to survive. It is merciless to the point of ludicrousness, rarely doling out full heals all while gleefully locking you into rooms with enemies that can (and will!) combo you to death. There are no i-frames, no insta-win upgrades, and no meta-progression to make the game more fair; you will learn to play by Wizard of Legend's rules, or get decimated trying.

And during its first twenty hours, I sure as hell got decimated.

In a lot of ways, I am reminded of my time with ScourgeBringer, another excellent roguelite where one badly bungled room can destroy an entire run. Both games aren't shy about hammering the player over and over for petty mistakes, but at least ScourgeBringer offers permanent upgrades that will become essential to your victory. Wizard of Legend instead boasts wider customization options out of the gate: your choice of a starting relic, cloak type, and your four core attacks. But its in-run upgrades provide significantly less impact than the blessings found in the Ordeal. I don't think one approach is superior to another per se—especially since you'll have to learn both games to the point of mastery anyway—but at least ScourgeBringer provides a sense of momentum as you gather upgrades throughout a run. Wizard of Legend on the other hand, is a vicious, no-holds-barred brawl that can kill you at the start just as easily as it can at the end.

What makes Wizard of Legend one of the most cutthroat roguelites I've played is that everybody in it is susceptible to stunlocking. Enemies, the player, bosses—all will kneel before the great leveler of the infinite combo. Well, provided they don't have any hyper armor on—which your enemies will evolve by floor two, by the way. Even the lowliest of dregs are capable of interrupting your earth-shattering specials, a mere slap setting you up nicely for their brawny buddies to tag-team you into oblivion. Some players may enjoy this ruthless "first to strike is first to win" philosophy, as it forces everyone to play by the same rules. But I guarantee that no matter what your preferred playstyle is, Wizard of Legend will wrench more than one exasperated expletive from your mouth as you watch your tiny warlock hopelessly battered back and forth like a well-worn tetherball. (I believe my first utterance of "Jesus Christ" was when two cyclopses beamed a geyser of red 5s out of my forehead.)

Due to the aggressive combat, you'll likely lean heavily into the game's ranged arcana—especially since flashy melee attacks leave you exposed for a fraction of a second too long. This has a tendency to render runs somewhat samey, especially once you discover that each elemental arcana comes with the same staples (rushdown attack, big AoE, delayed AoE, weak summon, strong summon, buff, totem, etc). This may imply Wizard of Legend lacks variety, but that couldn't be further from the truth; there's an impressive amount of arcanas, relics, cloaks, merchants, room layouts, and enemy attacks to memorize, fully capable of surprising you with something new 20 hours in. The issue is that you'll be quick to play favorites and slow to experiment, treating some of the relics and arcanas as obstacles in your path rather than tools to play around with.

Personal preference is inevitable in every roguelite, but since you can decide your most of your equipment before a run begins in Wizard of Legend, you'll have little reason to veer from your intended course. Which is a shame because it's a lot of fun in experimenting with new arcana and seeing how they work, even if they may not be all that useful. Better yet is when a previously-thought "worthless" arcana reveals its value as you grow accustomed to it: summons provide an excellent distraction, dash arcana can punish bothersome pursuers, and buffs can turn basic arcanas into full-fledged wrecking balls. Ranged attacks remain king of course—especially when dueling the final boss—but at least you'll have plenty of attacks to cycle between if you get tired of your usual loadout.

Speaking of the final boss, Wizard of Legend's big bad master mage joins the nightmarish ranks FTL's Flagship and Slay the Spire's Heart, where you must build your repertoire around their abilities. Dominating the rest of the game with a solid loadout means nothing if you're unable to strike Master Sura while he's vulnerable, a task that'll only grow harder as the fight wears on. And even if you manage to stun him, he can recover in the blink of an eye and retaliate with a string of lightning-fast combos, erasing your health with the fury of a teacher cleaning a swear word off their chalkboard. Even if you enter into it at full health, the duel remains a horridly lethal race to the bottom; I reckon I've lost more times to Sura at the last 20% of his HP than I've actually beaten him.

I hope my endless griping about Wizard of Legend's difficulty doesn't belie the fact that I really enjoyed my time with it. While it doesn't hit the consistent highs of the genre's best, in no way did I find it lacking or failing to live up to its potential. Sure, maps have too many dead ends and the game struggles to encourage experimentation, but for the most part it ticks all the right boxes: a good amount of randomization, an enjoyable combat system, fantastic animations, no external wiki help required, and a hard-earned victory you can be proud of. I suppose I'm hammering on Wizard of Legend's difficulty so much because the game lives or dies based off of whether you think it's unfair or not. And make no mistake—you will definitely find it unfair at times (like when you're being juggled to high hell during the wind master's signature arcana god damn knock it offfff!)

Similar to Spelunky, death is an ever-looming presence in Wizard of Legend, a shadow you're unable to shake. It forces you to play at a distance at all times, turning certain arcanas into a must-have, certain relics into a must-buy, and certain curses into a must-take. Wizard of Legend does offer build variety, with melee and rushdown builds blinking on the horizon like a shy lighthouse, but to cross the water is to chance drowning in a game full of turbulent waves. One wrong move, one miscalculation, and you'll be spent spiraling into the nether, death's icy grip clamping around your throat. In high-intensity games like Devil May Cry and Doom Eternal, you are the one to be feared, a force of nature laying waste to those foolish enough to get in your way. But in Wizard of Legend, you are a glass cannon, capable of shattering into a thousand pieces due to one impulsive misfire.

Wizard of Legend is cool—and fun!—but it has zero qualms about pulling down your pants to turn your ass into a pair of bongos.

Loop Hero - Thoughts

Loop Hero is a novel concept that struggles to "wow" the player beyond its drawing board. You're not likely to notice it during your first dozen hours or so, where everything is new, exciting, and strange. Unfamiliarity will usher in intrigue, the sense of discovery propelling you onward as the next upgrade, tile, and unlock is just around the corner. In that sense, I think Loop Hero succeeds in being a worthwhile experience with plenty of highs to look forward to—but its foundation is shaky, its philosophy confused, and its mechanics drunkenly slapped together. It's a beautiful game full of conflicting bits and frustrating design choices, leaving a bitter aftertaste only because it shows so much potential.

It's important to emphasize how utterly ingenious Loop Hero is—especially in a genre overflowing with imitators. Roguelites often fit snugly into "X-like" categories (eg "Isaac-likes, Spire-likes), but Loop Hero skirts all comparisons and mimicry. It's a bizarre amalgam of ideas: base building, auto battling, tile laying, hand management, and crunchy RPG equipment juggling. You get a little bit of everything, from loadout tinkering to permanent progression, from reliable strategies to RNG-derived wins. There's likely something here to tickle your fancy, as well as a gameplay concept you haven't encountered before—or at least, not in the peculiar way Loop Hero handles it.

On top of all that, Loop Hero's aesthetics are downright unmatched. The pixelated art style captures the world's bleakness better than its stilted writing ever could, with easily readable tile design and phenomenal color composition. The character portraits in particular are wonderfully rendered, with each friend and foe being as wildly strange as they are hauntingly beautiful. Complementing the carefully crafted visuals is a chiptune soundtrack that slaps so hard that you'll have to check your ears for bruises afterwards. It's impossible to name a favorite tune—pick any track out of the expansive OST and you'll get toe-tapping beats, chill jams and moody meditations. But where Loop Hero goes its hardest is in its boss-appearance themes, tossing the player into some of the most exceptional, hype-inducing headbangs to rouse your anticipation of the upcoming boss fight perfectly. I can't commend Deceiver and blinch enough for their positively phenomenal work

So if everything about Loop Hero stands out, where does it fall apart? The answer to that will require some digging...

... or rather, some constructing.

The base building system in Loop Hero is terrible in just about every conceivable way. While promising at the onset, you'll soon realize it's an elaborate front for unlocking new tiles. The placement of your shantytown is largely nebulous; only farms and lumber mills benefit from adjacency bonuses, but both are straight-up sunk costs, requiring way more resources to construct than they'll ever produce (seriously, you're giving me stable branches?!) In fact, a lot of the upgrades come across as the developers tossing crumbs at the player: 1% potion heals, garbage starting equipment, +30 max HP, and needless supply cap increases. Building upgrades are arbitrarily assigned (no upgrades for the warehouse and alchemist, but five for the watchtower?) and you're not likely to even notice this feature without the "?" tooltip on. Perhaps worst of all is that the intel center—a useful catalogue of everything seen and unlocked in the game—can only be built halfway through the campaign, forcing the player to learn much of the game's inner-workings on their own.

Exacerbating this problem are the game's numerous currencies, making it hard to parse what you need and where to get it. The resources start off simple enough—wood, stone, food, and metal—but they soon spiral into a grocery list of metaphysical concepts—evolution orbs, unity orbs, expansion orbs, and more. Each of these also come with their own fragmented version, complete with a different name and icon from their parent, just so you'll have to deal with nonsense equations like how 10 time shards form an astral orb or 20 noticeable changes form a metamorphosis. Loop Hero's intention is to encourage variety and experimentation (eg fight slimes for resource X, skeletons for resource Y), but the player doesn't know where these goods come from until they unlock the intel center! And by then, the player is two upgrades away from discovering alchemy, allowing them to transmogrify one resource into another—completely bypassing the need to diversify your tiles!

And this is a real problem for Loop Hero because the game's tiles are an imbalanced, chaotic mess that push you to play favorites.

Every tile comes with its upside and downside, the upside usually being a buff or reliable enemy spawn, and the downside being a... well, an enemy. It's a smart way to ensure that the player has to be cautious and temperate with their tile placement, lest their road becomes one long monster crossing. But some tiles are categorically inferior to others: swamps are terrible, sands are terrible, chrono crystals and bookeries are better off being other tiles, and temporal beacons aren't worth the obnoxious watcher fights. Meanwhile the forest, blood grove, oblivion, and village tiles (with complementary vampire mansion) are so essential that you won't ever entertain a run without them. Sure, occasionally you'll flirt with an outpost or storm temple, but the benefits provided by the "good" tiles will have you crawling back to your original deck before day's end, no matter which class you start as. The impressively dubbed "gold tiles" also suffer the same fate, with the arsenal tile being the only reliable pick of the lot (the necromancer and crypt can synergize, but once the HP-gain kicks into high gear you're already unkillable anyway).

Battles are my last point of contention, though I admit a big part of it is that auto-battlers simply aren't for me. Loop Hero's bestiary has a shocking amount of depth and diversity woven into it—the sheer number of status effects puts most RPGs to shame—but that ultimately means very little in regards to gameplay. Whether an enemy can poison you, or buff its allies, or shields itself matters not, as you have no control over your character's actions during battle (besides donning and doffing equipment, which you'll very rarely do). You can influence the pace at which monsters spawn outside of battle, but the dominant tactic by far is to open the flood gates. Gear is only acquired from routing enemies, with better gear dropping from stronger opponents—so you'll want to toss as many aggressive foes at your tiny patrolman as possible. Not only that, but certain monsters (like blood golems and vampire lords) provide categorically better loot than their peers, further differentiating the good tiles from the bad. I think if the player was given limited abilities they could activate per run, or one-time-use items, or even the option to manually activate their own healing potions, I would've been at least engaged in most of the combat, rather than browsing the internet on my second monitor.

I didn't realize until writing this entry just how much Loop Hero and Vampire Survivors have in common. While the promise of progression serves as their main hook, most of my enjoyment was wrung out of discovering the optimal strategy for both games. These titles aren't like Dead Cells or Hades, where a successful run leaves you giddy to toy with a new weapon or perk path; once you figure out how to properly "play" these games, all that's left to do is sit back and let your kill count skyrocket. But whereas Vampire Survivors succeeds in being a clever little diversion, Loop Hero displays a lot more potential—and thus, falls from a greater height. It's worth a playing to experience just how unique of a game it is, but Loop Hero is less of a diamond in the rough and more of a... murky gemstone.

It's pretty, but sadly undercooked.

Vampire Survivors - Thoughts

Mindless grind in games is a double-edged sword. On one hand it's a flagrantly obnoxious chore, a naked tax on your time that can drag down—if not completely ruin—an experience. On the other hand, it can provide a peaceful, low-pressure reprieve that allows your mind to focus on something else, similar to toying with a stress ball during a conversation. I've waded through numerous audiobooks while harvesting Monster Hunter materials, churned through podcasts during Destiny dailies, and listened to countless video essays on countless (failed) roguelite runs. Games like World of Warcraft, Pokemon, and Diablo are excellent multitasking outlets... provided you're in the mood for microscopic progress and tedious tasks.

Enter Vampire Survivors, the perfect bite-sized, grind-focused time-waster.

The reverse-bullet-hell genre Vampire Survivors has popularized is an unmistakably weird one. At first blush one might mistake Vampire Survivors for a twin stick shooter, but (believe it or not) it has more DNA in common with Cookie Clicker than Geometry Wars. Dodging and crowd control take a backseat to damage optimization, which gets easier and easier to manipulate and attain the more you play the game. You'll be able to permanently boost your base stats, unlock new characters & weapons, and discover game-changing relics like the map & randomazzo. While the first few runs may see you struggling to survive the full thirty minutes, just stick with it and you'll be showering the screen in bullets in no time.

The key to dominating Vampire Survivors like a BDSM-loving Belmont lies in discovering its strange weapon evolutions. Each weapon has a "superior" form that can easily double your damage output—provided you find the passive item that's required to unlock the upgrade. It's here where the game can devolve into its most chaotic form, granting some truly absurd abilities you can use to decimate Death himself. It's fun trying to figure out which passives are the key to which weapons, provided you can withstand some aimless trial and error. Once you stumble upon the correct combo for the first time, expect your eyes to light up as bright as the screen.

This ties into the next Clicker-esque mechanic that's guaranteed to dig its hooks into curious players: a copious amount of strange, secret unlocks. It's the main reason why you'll return to the game night after night, long after you've grown tired of its shallow and repetitive gameplay. You're always a run or two away from a new relic, weapon, character, stage, card, or feature that'll tickle the imagination, prompting some haphazard theory crafting and experimental combinations. Plus for the completionists out there, you can nab every achievement in the game in roughly 24 hours—or destroy your sanity in an attempt to complete every stage with every character, a task I can only imagine takes at least 100 hours to achieve. But no matter your preference, there's bound to be something that'll keep you up past your bed time, just itching to squeeze in just one more run.

However, none of this turns Vampire Survivors into what I'd call a good game.

It's fun and addictive, sure! But you have to overlook a host of issues in order to maintain the excitement you once felt at the beginning of your journey—the worst of which being the aforementioned shallowness. Each run made past your exploratory phase will be downright identical, with every character, arcana, and stages prioritizing the same weapon evolutions. You can play suboptimally and go for stuff like knives, garlic, and cats, but to what end? Any run capable to carrying you to the thirty minute mark will likely require zero input past minute fifteen, whether or not you've taken some inferior weapons. Like with Cookie Clicker, once your engine starts running you may as well step away from the computer and go fix yourself a snack.

And this is where another terrible aspect rears its ugly head: boredom. Bobbing and weaving around dense enemy clusters isn't as important to Vampire Survivors as its level-up slot machine is, making the optimal strategy on every stage to wander in circles collecting XP until you can forge one of the busted evolutions. The only real roadblock is figuring out what power-ups to take in what order, a challenge that's mitigated with the game's generous reroll and banish system. Expect brief jolts of excitement when a projectile enemy spawns in or a cluster of bats rushes by, but they're fleeting foes, barely taking up a minute of the stage's run time. Besides that, you'll fight off wave after wave of samey enemies, differentiated only by how long they each take to die. Even on Hurry mode, runs can drag intolerably on, wearing out their welcome like milk past its expiration date.

Vampire Survivors is ugly as sin, too. I don't usually find low-res sprite-based art styles to be a lazy or uninspired, but Vampire Survivors epitomizes the worst of the aesthetic. The UI is messy potluck of different font sizes, backgrounds are dry and featureless, and the bestiary is plagued with bargain bin Castlevania knockoffs. If you turn off your brain you can be mildly amused by all the flashing lights and colorful explosions, but the game is a far cry from being a looker. The best thing you can say about it is that the visuals are serviceable, which given that early SNES titles are more pleasing to the eye than this rainbow cacophony, isn't really saying much.

In spite of all my criticism, Vampire Survivors endures thanks to one simple fact: it's cheap as hell. The (initial) asking price of $3 is low enough to be worth the risk, as you can't really feel regret over that amount—or at least no more than buying a questionable bag of potato chips. That's why it can feel kind of silly criticizing the game over its shallow systems and janky artwork—Vampire Survivors is a dopey passion project, not a premier indie title that's crafted more carefully than an ice sculpture. Vampire Survivors doesn't tug at your emotions or leave you ruminating over its themes; it's ludicrous, droll, and tickles the primate part of your brain that likes seeing a deluge of numbers go up. In the video game world, it is a questionable bag of potato chips—but one of the more delightful ones that might just become your new favorite for the next few months.