Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £10.99
Where To Get It: Steam , Humble Store
Other Reviews: Early Access, Early Access 2

Called it. I said, in the first Early Access review I did of Vagante, that I would be tired of its shit by release, and lo… Release has hit, and I am well and truly glad to have this off my docket. That may seem mean, but let’s unpack exactly why I so heavily dislike Vagante.

Everything else I’ve been reviewing this month has, in its way, expanded upon the procgen/roguelike formula. Accessibility. Quality of life. Vagante, meanwhile, makes it quite clear that its response to issues I have with the difficulty curve are, essentially, “git gud.” And I’ve made it quite clear in the past how badly I respond to that.

Let’s play a game of “Spot the Character.” Take your time, I can wait…

Let us take, as an example, the bosses of the first three levels of the dungeon. Two of the three have projectile attacks with damage over time, and like to stay out of your reach. Combine this with the rarity of healing items, and melee is either a case of damage racing the enemy (Providing, of course, you have the hit points to do so, as all melee attacks are fixed animations you can’t interrupt, and daggers, previously a go-to, are now slow enough that they are once again a weak option), or timing your attacks just so, over a protracted period of waiting for your single-blow opening, dodging and leaping projectiles, and luring the boss somewhere where you can actually hit them before getting a blow off. Bosses are, naturally, a bundle of hit points, so this can take a while.

Okay, so we can cross the Warrior and Wildling off the “enjoyable to play” list in the very first area (The second area’s bosses seem to actively punish melee users.) What about the two ranged classes, the Rogue and the Mage? Well, as mentioned, while, previously, the Rogue’s dagger could avoid in-level enemy damage a lot of the time, and generally do well in the damage race due to sheer speed, the bow remains, as explored in the previous Early Access review, a case of “Draw for a second, release… Do as much damage as a single sword blow, maybe as much as a heavy axe on a crit. Enemy must be in shortish range from you, good luck avoiding those fireballs/poison globules.” It’s not often I say this, but the Mage, weak as their starting “weapon” is (a staff with a limited number of charges, charging by, er… hitting the enemy with its weak, slow attack), is a good choice, as they have some short range spells that do decent damage, relatively quickly… But, again, your starting attack relies on the enemy being nearby and in front of you, which, with fireballs and the like, isn’t a good idea, and it’s very much potluck if you get, for example, Frost Nova, a spell that has a chance of freezing the enemy for a vital few seconds.

DRAGON uses NOT ON SAME Y AXIS. It’s SUPER EFFECTIVE.

So far, I’ve described something unenjoyable, if not tedious. But wait, it gets better! It’s pretty dark, unless you have certain items (random drop chance), and instakill or damaging traps await, such as spikes (instadeath if you fall, or are knocked onto them, with the saving grace that enemies are also killed by them. Not bosses though), blockfall traps (mostly, thankfully, easy to spot once you know how, but still an occasional killer when, say, concentrating on an enemy), and worms (invincible until they attack, somewhat hard to see at times.) Want a heavier, more damaging weapon? Congratulations, you’ve found an axe, or a hammer, both of which… Are slow as hell, and have a minimum range on their hitbox. With melee enemies pretty much all rushing you as best they can.

In a way, it’s intriguing to me that a game can be so actively designed against its player characters, but alas, this has the side-effect that, for all that there may well be interesting things in the third dungeon area, for all that there may be new things to see, I most likely never will. Because the game is released, and I am so very done with it.

Goodbye, Vagante. I will fondly remember the time you had an option that wasn’t a tedious time.

Hrm. Big open area. 55 HP. Yup, I confidently predict I’m going to die, here on the first level.
And you’re probably as sick of seeing the Dragon now as I am.

The Mage is now seemingly the most viable class. I’d like that to sink in for a second.

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £6.99
Where To Get It: Steam
Other Reviews: Release

IMPORTANT REVIEW NOTE: The Steam Store page will tell you it is not English supporting. This is an oversight. Second menu button, third tab, bottom drop down menu option, select English. You’re welcome.

This past year, it seems, my cup runneth over with interesting, accessible, yet challenging Roguelikes. And Mad Crown was an especially nice surprise to review, considering the developers hadn’t originally planned to localise it until release. So, thanks for that, S-Game (M-Game?) , and thanks also for making said localisation moddable. Perhaps, with this, I could make a Wenglish translation. Enemy is BLEEDIN’ TAMPIN’ , BUTT.

Three thieves, and a treasure containing monster. I foresee pretty much everything running away this fight, some of it with my hard-earned…

But I digress. Mad Crown is a turn based roguelike, in which a slowly growing group of adventurers try to head deeper into a nether dungeon, to seek an artefact of great power that had gone missing previously. So far, so… Wait, buzzsaw robots? Grinning goblinoids and zombie gangers? Huh. Mad Crown’s world is an interesting and eclectic mix, and the hand drawn art style both stands out and sells it quite well. The music’s good, the UI’s clear, and the game?

The game isn’t bad at all. Difficult, yes. But difficult in a way that can be understood. Enemies debuff a lot, from Chaos (confusion) to Disarming (Removes equipment), and against that, each character has one basic attack, one special attack, one defensive ability, and a passive. Almost everything else is cards, from equipment cards (adding armour, damage, and special abilities), spells (The instant action Heraldries and the all group Upanishads providing an interesting balance: Do you want to attack as well as debuff or hurt a single enemy, or do you want to try affecting everyone with the debuff? Tough call), and items. Each dungeon run starts you at a low level (levelling up as you go), and the longer you take in the dungeon, the more overlevelled enemies get. Add in the other wrinkle, that if an enemy kills another enemy, it levels up, and…

The further into the dungeon you get, the more interesting it becomes. Although, y’know, also the more *lethal* it becomes…

…Look, there’s a lot of depth here, both in the dungeon, and the town. Individual dungeons are relatively short, the game mostly tutorialises well, and it gets a lot of good mileage out of the features currently present in the game. I’ve crowed with delight as I killed multiple opponents in a single turn, and recoiled as what I thought was going to be an easy enemy ate its friends, and suddenly became a miniboss. Said “easy” enemy is now higher on my target list in a fight, precisely because it’s one of the few that willingly attacks its own friends without confusion.

And yet, it remains at least moderately fair, due to its rescue system. Got a friend with the game? Good, because they can save your kit, and you can save theirs, once you get far enough in the story that the rescue of your equipment from your corpses is no longer automatic. Copy a code to your clipboard, give it to your friend, and they rescue your kit. Nice, encourages you having friends playing, and makes the difficulty curve just that little bit smoother in the earlier stages of the game.

Overall, I quite like Mad Crown, occasional frustrations aside. It’s got promise, it’s got a lot to unpack and unlock, and its systems are easily explained and learned in play. I look forward to seeing where this one goes.

Eep.

The Mad Welshman is pleased to be the first english language reviewer of this game. Wooooooo!

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: PWYW (Developer Patreon also an option)
Where To Get It: Itch.IO

When the first thing a friend asks me on showing them a shot of the game is “Was this programmed in HyperCard?” , I know that, on an aesthetic level, WORLD OF HORROR, a short investigative adventure game inspired by early Mac games and the horrific art of Junji Ito, is definitely working as intended. And, considering the game’s short and sweet as well at the present stage of its development? The stars are seemingly aligned.

…Alas, not, generally speaking, in my favour. Oh well, nobody said stopping reality from breaking was easy!

Backing up a bit, WORLD OF HORROR (caps intended) is currently in a demo stage, showing off the three main methods of play (Single area, timed investigation; home/progressive investigation; location/day based investigation.) It’s a game in which high school students of Horror Japan (The city of OOO, In the year 19XX) are the only hope of even delaying eldritch horror based apocalypse, often based on urban myths, such as Red Coat or Bloody Mary, or on J-Horror themes, like a festival of sacrifice and the like.

While each playstyle is different, some things remain the same throughout. Combat is brutal, as, y’know, students versus ancient evils, ghosts, witches and killers rarely ends well. Items and spells, while useful, are always double edged swords. And each case can be completed (for good or for ill) in around ten to twenty minutes. As such, while the game is difficult, it’s short enough that I genuinely don’t mind that I’ve either died horribly or ushered in the apocalypse in all but one of my runs so far. Not everything is clear in the game (the DOOM meter, for example, doesn’t seem to do much right now), but again, short runs let me get used to things like quickly checking my inventory, and experimenting with buttons to see what they do (The 1 and 2 are important with the first case, as is checking your storage!)

See, on the one hand, exploring school in a Kendo Helmet looks silly. On the *other* , it’s protection. More important than my fashion sense.

So, while there’s not currently a lot of game in WORLD OF HORROR, what there is is quick, relatively easy to get into despite some minor unfriendlinesses in the UI, and it plays to its retro-aesthetic strengths well, with eerie chiptunes, clever 1-bit art (Not necessarily black and white, as the title card allows you to change between a variety of dark/colour palettes… I went with a nice, soothing cyan), and, overall? I found myself wanting to see more of this strange, bloody world.

More. So much more…

Hopefully a portent of things to come, but the main UI changes according to need.

The Mad Welshman is IN.

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Source: Review Copy
Price: £10.29
Where To Get It: Steam

I was only talking about cheery dystopias a few weeks back, and yet, here we are with Deep Sixed, a game that has all the fun hallmarks. Remember, if your reactor is critically leaking, you may wish to repair it. If you cannot repair it, you may wish to send an emergency beacon. If the emergency beacon is not working, you may wish to send an emergency beacon.

Okay, I got *part* of it right.

Okay, so that’s not exactly what’s said, but the general sentiment, among others, is there, carefully and cheerily enunciated by the voice actress for URSA, the AI companion on your indefinite corrective period of exploration and adventure.

Which, translated, means: You’re indentured to explore a nebula on behalf of a corporation, because you fucked up, and your ship is a hunk of junk that will probably kill you if the local life forms don’t. This works both for and against the game. Let’s start with that good ol’ “For” column.

Deep Sixed does one thing quite well, and that’s setting its mood. You’re isolated, so your only contact with… Well, anyone is either email, mission descriptions, or your handy dandy (until it breaks) AI companion, URSA. You’re clearly not valued as anything more than an expendable resource, because your ship’s a hunk of junk, and only by doing jobs for the company can you make it anything but, or repair massive damage… And it will still break down with distressing regularity. Oh, and you’re not a trained worker, why would you be? So you get a manual of iffy usefulness, to help you with the repairs you’re inevitably going to be doing… Alone.

Ugh. Of *course* nobody told me the job would involve getting slimed. Of *course* they didn’t…

And, on a quiet mission, with only a few problems, this is fine. It adds atmosphere, and the fact that some of the missions are themselves an exercise in tedium is, itself, part of the allure. But when things go drastically wrong, as they inevitably will?

ARGH. One early example was after I’d discovered the existence (through a plot mission) of Zephyrlings. Zephyrlings run in packs. Zephyrlings can quickly short the power of your modules, forcing you to waste valuable time flipping to the power room to repower the viewing stations, and combat with multiple opponents is best described as “An exercise in slow, painful, and frustrating death.” There are thing to make it somewhat easier, like shields, a deceleration field that can slow some enemies, and a hotkey for switching laser types… But combat is definitely one of the weaker parts of the game, and, interestingly enough, creates the more difficult to solve problems (recalibrating lasers, repairing hull damage mid fight, combatting fires mid fight.) There is an “Easy” mode, but, beyond actually telling you what problems exist, allowing pre-mission saves, and disabling achievements, it’s not… All that much easier.

As such, despite its charm, the woman of colour protagonist, some pretty good voice acting and writing, and some interesting ideas, overall, Deep Sixed turns me off. It’s not that these difficulties are insurmountable. It’s not that you can’t learn how to be a good captain of a shitty ship. It’s not that the game isn’t working well… Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s simply that this kind of experience, while interesting in small bursts, isn’t great for me overall. If you like a game that is tough, but with the toughness coming more from stimulus overload than lack of clarity, then perhaps Deep Sixed is for you.

As it turns out, reading the manual for fixing oxygen leaks while oxygen leaks are happening is… A bad idea.

The Mad Welshman would like to note the devs appear receptive to constructive criticism, as noted by the addition of continuing from saves to Easy Mode just prior to this review being written.

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Source: Free
Price: Free
Where To Get It (Free) : Steam

For all that the “Walk in a desolate area and listen to audiologs/read notes” subgenre of computer games is much maligned (and sometimes rightly so), when done well, minimalism can be turned to advantage, and the story becomes so much the richer. So it is, for me at least, with The Alpha Device, a game that definitely has its flaws (One of which confuses me greatly), but, storywise, enthralled and entertained me.

Simple geometric shapes are fun when you put them together, kids!

Let’s get those aforementioned flaws out of the way first. If you’re not a fan of the school of graphic design among indie games of “Return unto the mostly untextured, if not uncoloured polygons”, then odds are you’ll be predisposed not to like this. Which would be a shame, as the game does clever things with simple shapes (Clever things like using simple shapes as templates to poke holes in other simple shapes… To make shapes that become both more full of holes and chunky bits.) Furthermore, the game is gamepad only, which, I must say, confuses the hell out of me, considering it’s coded in the Unity engine, which makes both multiple control schemes and other quality of life improvements… Well, not a doddle, but certainly not beyond. Still, the game is effectively free, so it would be highly impolite of me to do more than express my confusion there.

Now… The voice acting is an advertising point of the game, and considering that the sole voice actor, David Hewlett, is well known, and has proven his chops multiple times, this is a good point. He really sells the bitterness of one of the last human beings well, that loss and confusion, swinging easily into the undercurrent of hopeless anger that characterises his own storyline. It helps that the story surprised me with how, like Mr. Hewlett’s acting, it swings comfortably between scales, moving from the galactic to the personal, back and fore in a slowly closing gyre, to its twist conclusion. The twist, admittedly, felt a tiny bit off, but only a tiny bit, as it was more that it relies on you realising the dissonance of the audio logs (and your discovery thereof) , than a not-twist, or some other, completely out of the blue revelation with no foreshadowing.

Not pictured: Some good voice acting.

And then… Ah, well. While the game is, technically, quite short, lasting approximately an hour, this is a technically. I won’t spoil the precise mechanics of that technically, but it was fitting, it was clever, in its way, and it satisfied my black little heart, for, listening to the story, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit of anger of my own in sympathy with the protagonist.

As such? Well worth a look if you like minimalistic storytelling.

Simple. Geometric. Shapes.

The Mad Welshman has done his best to keep this review spoiler free. That is all.

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