What Did We Play Yesterday?

I'm going through my Steam library and giving abandoned games a second go before I toss them into the BYE pile for good.

I can't figure out if the developers of Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP actually want people to play the game or not. It's designed in such a way it's very easy to disengage and walk away. There is an ongoing discussion thread on Steam called Why do people not finish this game? that is 18 pages long. 

I picked it up in a bundle some years ago and promptly finished the first chapter. There was an intermission in which a character invited me to take a break. So I did. For like two years. I tried again and did the same thing: took a break and forgot about it for years. The cheevos indicate I'm not alone.

My third attempt has me halfway through the game, but I've got this sense of general annoyance I can't quite put my finger on. There is a section of the game that is tied to real time, certain events can only occur on certain days. The player can either change the PC date/time (the game explicitly tells the player how to "cheat" in this way), wait until the appropriate day (for me, four days hence), or utilize an in-game mechanism to change the day. The in-game mechanism must be retriggered if you turn the game off, which requires going back to the dream world and walking all the way out to the grotto again, then waiting for the moon to reach the right phase again.

These issues alone aren't necessarily deal-breakers, but there's something about the design issues and uninspired puzzles in combination with the pixel art and overtly-quirky dialogue and the Twitter interactivity gimmick that rubs me the wrong way. I'll either pick it back up in four days or another two years, we'll see.

I've become increasingly interested in so-called 'casual' games, which are more complex and engaging than their detractors imply. Also, I thought I should at least attempt to live up to my reputation as a shitty casual.

Morphopolis started this particular journey. It's a mellow, nicely-illustrated Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure (currently 50c on Steam) about an insect exploring the world. It's an enjoyable couple of hours and an easy perfect game. My only quibble is the ways to interact with the puzzles are not always intuitive. Remembering it's a mobile port helped (when in doubt, drag).

Artifex Mundi is widely considered the gold standard of HOPA, so I decided to play their highly-rated Enigmatis 2: The Mists of Ravenwood next. (They all have silly names.) Huge jump in production values. It's another over-the-top supernatural mystery, but it works as an interactive penny dreadful. The hidden object games fit the story and make thematic sense. The puzzles are more varied (although the game's insistence on puzzles where one mechanism moves two pieces, and you have to align all the pieces in a particular order, was really annoying) and there are two types of collectible items.  It has multiple difficulty levels where various hint systems are restricted at higher difficulties. It employs fast-travel. Puzzles can be skipped and hidden-object games can be replaced with match games. I enjoyed it much more than I expected!

The cheevos reflect the niche status. While comparatively inexpensive, $9.99 is not necessarily an impulse buy. At least 57% of players have played, 40% sat through all the early cutscenes, about 12%-ish snagged the collectibles, and 6% achieve a perfect game, which requires at least two playthroughs since there are achievements for completing all the HOGs and all the match games and you can't do both.

Artifex Mundi has a very loyal fanbase. Most of their games are rated highly by that base. I don't know how many of these I could play, but I did make a point of picking up a bundle to try later. They are comparable to genre pulp, very much a type of comfort food, so some players will happily inhale the library and others might only tolerate a few before needing a palate cleanser.

I decided to try a more traditional HOPA I picked up a while ago, Alchemy Mysteries: Prague Legends by Jetdogs. The production values are iffy, but surprising care was put into some of the details. It has smooth background rotation and there are actually animated models that walk the streets in the background, for example. The CG, graphics, and voice acting are pretty dodgy and it has a goofy supernatural/arcane story I didn't pay much attention to. I was surprised by the variety of puzzles and the number of helpful hint features. The hidden object scenes were cluttered with random objects. The puzzles were not very intuitive and there is a lot of backtracking. Lots of "jump scares" that are too slow/gradual to genuinely startle. Unsurprisingly, only about 35% of players cracked open the game--these games are often heavily discounted or bundled, so it's an easy impulse buy. But 23% of players finish the game and 12% get a perfect game, which is a very good completion rate. I wouldn't recommend that game but I was interested enough to try another.

I have reacquainted myself with my favorite shmups plus a few new ones I had stashed in my library. I really enjoy the zen of shooters, but they're hard on my hands. After a few days of practice I hit 100 million in Danmaku Unlimited 2, but I had a dull, persistent ache in my right thumb, wrist, and upper forearm (???) for the entire day. It's a personal scoring milestone, but to put it in perspective, the Classic Easy leaderboard top score is 24 trillion. Many of the shooters I've played require multiple buttons be held simultaneously for sustained periods. Changing the keymapping helps somewhat, particularly if the game allows mapping to shoulder buttons, but since I depend on my ability to type for my livelihood it does limit how much I can play without resting.

I have a couple of shooters I'm invested in, the aforementioned Danmaku Unlimited 2 and Crimzon Clover: World Ignition. Both are bullet hells that require full mastery to unlock all the Steam achievements. In DU2, the 'big one' is the trillion point achievement. Crimzon Clover puts less emphasis on scoring achievements, so the big achievement is 1CCing the game in arcade mode, which means beating the game on the most challenging difficulty with no continues. Both of these achievements are earned by less than one percent of players. I could get into the gritty details and bore everyone, but I think the DU2 achievement is ultimately more obtainable for me.

There was a point in time I would have dismissed any hope whatsoever of accomplishing a 1CC run in either game, let alone on hard mode, but I think I've hit some sort of invisible bullet hell threshold because suddenly I found myself improving much more quickly than I had in the past. I think a lot of it is muscle memory, but I noticed another big leap after I practiced grazing in DU2 (allowing bullets to enter a radius near the ship, sometimes even passing through the ship itself, but not hitting the core; this contributes to a graze score multiplier). It made me more comfortable with bullet proximity and less likely to twitch too much, an necessity in levels where the screen is essentially covered in neon.

Anyway, I am generally not a competitive player, so it's fun to have an interest in scoring mechanics. It's requires a different mental approach and playstyle than playing a game to beat it.

I have reacquainted myself with my favorite shmups plus a few new ones I had stashed in my library. I really enjoy the zen of shooters, but they're hard on my hands. After a few days of practice I hit 100 million in Danmaku Unlimited 2, but I had a dull, persistent ache in my right thumb, wrist, and upper forearm (???) for the entire day. It's a personal scoring milestone, but to put it in perspective, the Classic Easy leaderboard top score is 24 trillion. Many of the shooters I've played require multiple buttons be held simultaneously for sustained periods. Changing the keymapping helps somewhat, particularly if the game allows mapping to shoulder buttons, but since I depend on my ability to type for my livelihood it does limit how much I can play without resting.

I have a couple of shooters I'm invested in, the aforementioned Danmaku Unlimited 2 and Crimzon Clover: World Ignition. Both are bullet hells that require full mastery to unlock all the Steam achievements. In DU2, the 'big one' is the trillion point achievement. Crimzon Clover puts less emphasis on scoring achievements, so the big achievement is 1CCing the game in arcade mode, which means beating the game on the most challenging difficulty with no continues. Both of these achievements are earned by less than one percent of players. I could get into the gritty details and bore everyone, but I think the DU2 achievement is ultimately more obtainable for me.

There was a point in time I would have dismissed any hope whatsoever of accomplishing a 1CC run in either game, let alone on hard mode, but I think I've hit some sort of invisible bullet hell threshold because suddenly I found myself improving much more quickly than I had in the past. I think a lot of it is muscle memory, but I noticed another big leap after I practiced grazing in DU2 (allowing bullets to enter a radius near the ship, sometimes even passing through the ship itself, but not hitting the core; this contributes to a graze score multiplier). It made me more comfortable with bullet proximity and less likely to twitch too much, an necessity in levels where the screen is essentially covered in neon.

Anyway, I am generally not a competitive player, so it's fun to have an interest in scoring mechanics. It's requires a different mental approach and playstyle than playing a game to beat it.

Prior to Steam sales I dig around in my bundle stash to see if I have any unclaimed keys I've forgotten about. I almost always find at least one game that was on my to-buy list. This time a nice, crisp copy of Guacamelee Super Turbo Championship Edition was humming softly as it played with luchador dolls, waiting for my return.

Guacamelee presents an interesting development situation. When the development team created additional content for the game they were apparently unable to release this content as DLC for the original game, Guacamelee Gold, so they created a second "definitive" version of the game, Guacamelee Super Turbo Championship Edition. I was happy to be able to play GSTCE while GG was still fresh in my mind to see how they compared.

GSTCE adds new sections, such as the Canal de las Flores, as well as improved controls and map refinements. Obviously I went into this game already familiar with the general layout and controls, and therefore had an advantage. As expected, I had little trouble progressing, even wearing the Pinata Costume, which makes the player more vulnerable in exchange for larger coin drops. The Tule Tree was the real test. In Guacamelee Gold there were several treasure chests I gave up on. I died/fell dozens of times at each major obstacle, slowing progress to a crawl, and ended up putting the game aside near the top of the tree.

In GSTCE, I was able to complete most of these jumps within several tries, including jumps I was never able to complete in GG. I traversed the Tule Tree in one sitting. GSTCE is not an easy game, the Temple of War is kicking my ass right now, but feels like a much more manageable difficulty that can be overcome by trial and error.

GSTCE's normal mode presents a true "normal" difficulty level, whereas GG is just ridiculously fucking hard in certain areas, which makes it feel unbalanced. GSTCE also comes packaged with a new Intenso mechanic, a power-up mode that increases your speed and power . This mode, combined with the purchase of a break-any-barrier upgrade, means players who get stuck on tricky shielded enemies can bust their way through if they have to.

This is how you improve a game.

They worked on most of the things I talked about my previous post, plus they added a new mechanism that allows more skilled players to rack up crazy combos while providing a 'lifesaver' ability for players who get bogged down by swarms of enemies. For those who git gud, a hard mode and leaderboards. Multiple save slots. Extra costumes. GSTCE is an improvement in every conceivable way. I don't begrudge them creating a separate updated version of the game the changes are so good (and I've now learned they routinely offer 80% loyalty discount, putting the price at DLC levels). For the first time in recent memory I'm quite happy to own two copies of a game.

In Saints Row IV when you rescue Shaundi you are introduced (or reintroduced, as the case may be) to Saints Row 2 "Fun" Shaundi, the original incarnation of a character who is much more serious and angry in later games. Predictably, the two don't get along. In Shaundi's loyalty mission there's a meta bit where the two Shaundis acquire superpowers and compete/roughhouse before deciding to put aside their differences and team up to kill their ex. 

The quest requires tracking down and killing drug dealers to steal a superpower-inducing drug. Somewhere between alien invasions, plunger rifles, leaping tall buildings in a single bound, and stripper poles in the White House* I'd almost forgotten the Saints were once a notorious and violent street gang. Volition's pivot from gritty du jour to absurdist meta-game President simulator is really something.

Shaundi's missions feel a little too gritty. I greatly preferred the next mission: rescuing Pierce from a Godzilla-esque Saints Flow by shooting it in the face with a rocket launcher. Now that'sthe content I signed up for. 

* This may have been discussed before, but there's a conversation between Kinzie and the Boss regarding stripper poles in which the Boss says she uses them to keep fit. 1) Nah. 2) Little doubt the male Boss version of this conversation is completely different, but I thought about how gratifying it would be if a male Boss casually admitted to daily stripper pole aerobics to keep his butt firm.

I've been meaning to return to Saints Row IV for a while and a friend has now spurred me to action. I remade the same boss as before, only this time I gave her the Southern accent instead of the French accent.

This fucking game, man.

It makes perfect sense that my boss would have beaten Trump in his re-election campaign, so that is my new headcanon. It's a good thing too, because Trump is ill-equipped to deal with these types of domestic issues. I bet he's never even fired a rocket launcher before.

It is my sad duty to report Guacamelee Gold will probably be the best game I never finish.

It's a really phenomenal platformer. The controls are smooth and responsive, the graphics are awesome, it's funny, easter eggs and homage to ye platformers of old abound. It is also extremely difficult. My reflexes are decent, but it's one thing to be able to hit a button or joystick quickly and another to be able to hit combinations of buttons quickly and remember a variety of different moves. I have trouble with right/left anyway, so I tend to get flustered and hit the wrong button and, bam, bottom of the pit. While the game generously respawns you on the last platform you touched, I've reached the point where even the smallest progression has become a significant time expenditure. I haven't given up entirely, but when I sit down to play a game at the end of the day I generally want to play a game, not fall into the same pit 25 times.

According to the devs, Guacamelee Super Turbo Championship Edition is heavily rebalanced and removes the "cheap" sections of the level design, but that would require that I buy another copy of the game and start over. I'm not necessarily averse to starting over, but I was a little annoyed to find there are two different versions of the same game and I would be pissed if I found myself back in the exact same position in STCE.

I decided to try another Metroidvania and ended up with La-Mulana, an exploratory platformer that is also very challenging for entirely different reasons. The controls are limited, so part of the challenge is understanding those limits, but the rest is navigating intricate puzzles and maps. The player is equipped with a bull whip, a la Indiana Jones, and a laptop with various software programs for additional UI features. La-Mulana requires the player unlock the ability to view maps (finding the maps themselves it a separate task), warp from save points (sorely needed, oh my God), and read tablets, among other things. There is software to record tablet text that I haven't found yet, so I've been jotting things down in a notepad in the meantime.

One could not find more disparate Metroidvanias. Both are challenging, but one should be more accessible than the other. (What follows is a long ramble that may be partially moot depending on how finely Guacamelee STCE has been tuned...)

I'm going to preface this by saying there should be punishingly-difficult games and there should be games that offer accessibility features (easy mode) and it's the developer's responsibility to determine which is appropriate. You can do whatever the hell you want with your ASCII roguelike but generally when I purchase a game I expect to be able to beat it given reasonable time and effort.

Accessibility is usually going to address mechanical difficulty rather than intellectual difficulty. If a game relies on cheap tricks to ramp up the difficulty -- flooding the player with projectiles or overwhelming enemy waves, punishing resource scarcity, etc -- those mechanisms can easily be reduced or eliminated to create an easier difficulty setting. (It's also a poorly-designed game, but that's a different issue.) Players should be able to skip mini-games, either via options or after a certain number of failures. Quick-time events should be optional. I feel really strongly about players being held hostage to crap that gets shoe-horned into a game for the same of gameplay.

Guacamelee is designed around tricky platforming that requires physical and mental mastery of its controls, but it also provides challenging enemy encounters and bosses. The former cannot easily be changed and is essential to the game's feel, but the latter can be adapted, so an easy mode would constitute less enemy encounters and reduced difficulty bosses. Most players can still reasonably complete the game, but only the most proficient players are able to max out stats or cheevos. It's a reasonable compromise between 'git gud' and 'I'd like to actually play this game I bought kthx'. Ideally, the game would have been designed so that the most punishing platforming was reserved for collectibles or optional content, but having played half of the Tule Tree section in Guacamelee Gold I can tell you this is not the case.

Indie darling La-Mulana presents a combination of intellectual/limitation-based challenges, and those challenges are not easily circumvented without watering-down the game experience. I think this is the sort of game the git gud crowd may be thinking of when they are resistant to calls for accessibility. Even if the player is given a handicap (increased HP, for example), the crux of the game is exploring complicated tombs and solving riddles and puzzles, so there's not a good way to reduce the difficulty without changing the game or eliminating the need to traverse entire areas. And in that case... why play? Once that aspect is stripped away, what does La-Mulana have left?

Guacamelee Gold bothers me at times because I know my inability to progress is the result of my fingers/brain not being fast or well-coordinated enough and that's very frustrating. I want to play, and can mostly play, but I can't play well enough to fully enjoy the product. As a developer, I would consider that a problem. La-Mulana is what it is. If I can't progress it's because I haven't figured out a puzzle, so it's a question of 'do I want to devote time to exploring and solving this riddle' rather than 'do I want to devote time to attempting this jump 50 times straight'. In other words, the difference between being unable to progress versus being unwilling [to devote the resources] to progress. La-Mulana is only going to appeal to a certain demo, it's a niche game and as such, gets a pass. Guacamelee can, and does, appeal to a much broader range, and that should be taken into consideration.

AAAs, on the other hand, should be completely accessible across the board. I mean completely. There should be a story mode. There should be multiple difficulty levels, and yes, the 'easy' mode should in fact be easy. There should be a nightmare mode and corresponding cheevos that only the most skilled players can obtain. If you made a badly-designed game, I should be able to circumvent or otherwise adjust my exposure the shitty, unfun parts, like endless wave enemies or QTEs. This doesn't tamper with anyone's vision (and there are so many devs involved in these huge titles there is no one 'vision' anyway), it just makes the games playable for everyone who shells out for it.