What Did We Play Yesterday?

A Robot Named Fight is a metrovania roguelite wherein you play a lone robot battling their way through a procedurally-generated world overrun by guts and flesh so they can find and destroy the megabeast. Fight is a Super Metroid homage that draws from games like the Binding of Issac. The mechanics click but the aesthetic not so much, so while I'm a big fan of Super Metroid I wasn't able to get into this one as much as I'd hoped. Fight emphasizes exploration and item-driven puzzles. Death is forever, but the farther you get each run the more items you unlock for future runs. A full run is estimated around two hours, so this isn't a coffee break game, but since gameplay is room-to-room finding a stopping point is never an issue.

I picked this up because I was really interested in the idea of a Super Metroid that's different every run. I've played it a fair bit and enjoy it in small doses, but the disgusting visuals wear on me after a while, as does the map repetition. I started to get tired of encountering the exact same gut-encrusted hallways and rooms, often multiple times in succession. (I wrote this review before I got into the habit of taking screenshots and could not be bothered to take one for this post, a Startpage image search will show you precisely what I mean.)

I'll add that Fight is the game that made me swear I'd stop playing roguelites for a while. I've developed procedural generation fatigue. Increasingly, it feels like procedurally-generated levels are just a way to cut corners and avoid committing to solid level design. It turns out I don't want "4 billion unique runs," I just want one really good run. I expect to return to this one from time to time, but I really wish it wasn't so ugly. I'm not asking for rainbows and kittens or anything (well, aCTuallY~...), I just want something slightly less disgusting to look at for two hours.

Also, as an aside, I saw someone refer to this as a "metroguelike." Clearly this generation of gamers is comprised of irredeemable savages. I propose we dispense with the Disgusting Roguelite subgenre entirely and devote ourselves to ushering in a golden age of Cutevania. I googled "cutevania." It doesn't exist? And this, gentle friends, is why we all deserve to perish.

I had a situation where I bought several games in a row that were too difficult to finish. This frustrated the hell out of me. I was complaining to a friend that I just wanted to farm and walk around and not actively work at anything, and they were like, "Boy, do I have the game for you," and they were right. Yonder is probably the most chill game experience possible where you still actually do things.

At first I was underwhelmed with the game because it seemed like a glorified fetch quest matrix with a weirdly stubby hero, but damned if the thing didn't grow on me. I don't know if it was feeding the cute animals or finding hidden kittens or my OCD coupled with the ability to pick up every stick and rock on the ground and somehow find a use for it.

I want to give them props for making a game with no violence whatsoever, except the catching and eating of fish. If you jump off a cliff, a little parachute opens and you gently land. If you jump in deep water, the screen fades and you respawn on the nearby bank. Hides and meat exist in-game, and to avoid actually killing animals you are given box traps which you set, and when you return you get a hide resource, or a piece of meat, or whatever.

There's a story which I mostly ignored. There's something called the Murk that often blocks your path and you can enlist sprites to help you clear it. The sprites tell bad puns. Fortunately you don't have to talk to them much. You can explore the land and build farms, join guilds, collect stuff, do fetch quests, wear clothes, and craft. The farming is the exact level of non-complexity I needed at the time, and while I appreciate how the farms are set up and how resources are harvested I wish there were more crops. You can bribe wild animals with food to live on your farm. The fishing mechanics are solid and fun. There are a couple of surprise events I won't mention here because it was fun to stumble onto these without any foreshadowing

At first the barter system annoyed me, but soon I started to get into it. I wanted to complete all the bridges, you see, and bartering was the best way to get those succulent stone arches and stone pillars. That system, and the way resources are tiered, ultimately worked for me.

One of my favorite things about the game is if you build two absurdly resource-costly rope bridges you can find an unmarked town called Troll Island or something to that effect. The island is filled with trolls sitting on piles of poo swirls. They are all complaining about the game. Now, this in and of itself is delightful, but on top of that, none of their criticism is actually wrong. Like, the protagonist DOES walk funny. The game IS a giant fetch quest. And so on. So I love that the devs made this place, and filled it with moderate, reasonable criticism alongside lovingly-crafted poo swirls. Shine on, friends.

So, Yonder: a decidedly chill wander-about experience, if you're into that. I feel like it really encapsulates what indie games bring to the medium. It's not perfect, but it provides a specific and fairly unique experience. It's definitely not for everyone, but I'm glad games like this are out there.

Within the first 60 seconds you can just tell Minit is a Devolver Digital game. This was a day-one purchase for me and I quite enjoyed it.

Minit is a zelda clone with a twist (the player is cursed with a 60-second time loop), an Earthbound-esque sense of humor and pixel art sensibilities. Your progress is cumulative, so you may spend 60 seconds obtaining a key, then the next 60 seconds using it to unlock a nearby tomb to retrieve an item, and so on. The map is necessarily compact, though the player is able to claim new starting points in various locations--a trailer, a hotel--and move between these strategically depending on which objective lies ahead.

I recommend going in blind on this one. It's a short game and you can expect to spend about an hour and a half on your first run, more if you want to collect all the hearts and items, and you can chase that with a higher difficulty + game if you're up for it. I had to look up a few things but overall the puzzles work and are a good challenge to sort out.

The world of Minit is a fun one to explore, and the game is just long enough to provide a sense of accomplishment without wearing out the gimmick.

Kingdom: New Lands is a passive pixel art roguelite kingdom-building simulator that is probably best played on a mobile device. As the ruler of the Kingdom, you begin the game with a horse and a handful of coins at a campsite. You can give coins to beggars to turn them into citizens, who can then be assigned jobs. Builders can expand and fortify your kingdom, archers can protect it and hunt for game, which result in coins, and farmers can till the land for coins. At night monsters called greedlings attack your camp. They can break the fortifications and hit citizens, returning them to beggar status. If they hit the ruler, the ruler drops a coin which they steal. If you have no coins left, they will steal your crown, and its game over. Your goal is to find and repair the shipwreck on the island, and once your people move it to the sea you can continue on to the next island. The game is won when you finish the fifth island.

This game was recommended to me and had been on my list for years, so I wanted to like it, but it's an incredibly passive game and it ended up being somewhat boring. There is no way to actively assign or cancel tasks, so if you accidentally mark a tree for destruction too close to nightfall you can lose a builder because the AI will send them to cut the tree down even though it's too dangerous to leave the camp. The greedlings attack from whichever side is closest to the greedling portal and those attacks get really aggressive, especially during a blood moon, and it's not uncommon to have a bunch of archers milling around on the wrong side of the camp, doing nothing, while the portal-side is being viciously destroyed.

Some players have put an incredible amount of hours into this game and talk about the depth of the strategy, but unfortunately most of the strategy is just resource management that compensates for the fact the player has very little actual control over the environment. Being unable to cancel tasks, for example, seems a lot more like developer oversight than a design choice for the sake of strategy. Strategy ends up being investing a lot into archers, keeping fortifications tight and focusing on the void side, and micro-managing builders. Oh, and waiting. There's a good bit of waiting. Since this is a roguelite, a lot of the difficulty depends on the island generated. If you start on an island with several beggar camps nearby and the shipwreck is close your game will be much easier than if you have to travel far to recruit citizens and build the ship.

Just to put the nail in the coffin, the game also has a significant number of dumb cheevs that require the player to perform specific acts that seem arbitrarily chosen, at least from my perspective having played a few hours. Don't start the camp until the third day, for example. Hunt 20 or more deer by the fourth day. It's unsurprising far more players get the "win the game" achievement than most of the others.

I read a review that said if you don't love this game by the second hour, you probably never will, and I think that's a good assessment.