Source: Review Copy
Price: 79p. Yes, you heard that right. £1.99 with the artbook and soundtrack.
Where To Get It: Steam

Never let it be said that developers don’t know what works for them, at least some of the time. Once again, Sometimes You creates something cheap, simple, and logical, involving making things add up. But don’t worry, math phobes… This time, it’s colour matching, not equations. And I say that this is okay without a hint of sarcasm.

This is an example of how you start a puzzle…

Essentially, there are rows and columns of coloured blobs. Clicking one of those rows or columns changes the whole row or column, and you want them all to be one colour. Nice, simple, easy to understand. It’s enough to make a critic’s hair come out in clumps. After all, it works, it’s cheap, it’s fun. That should be ideal, right? I can even point to it and say “This is for people who like logic puzzles, don’t need to worry about story… Oh, and digital art of some flavours of sci-fantasy abstract cats of varying quality is in there too, so… Maybe cat fans?”

But we love our words. We love having things to say. What, in the end, can we say about a game so simple, so deadly simple, that if the developer fucked it up, we would feel pity? Oh, they didn’t, by the way. Last time, I talked about aliens and their strange foibles. This time, I think, we shall meditate on colour blindness.

…And this is a particularly nice finish, and a particularly growly cat. Go me. Go cat.

Colour blindness afflicts many of us. It makes certain games unplayable, and developers either know how to deal with it, or they find out they have to learn, quite quickly. Games have lived or died on the colour blindness vote. Energy Cycle, I am happy to say, is distinctly colour blindness friendly. A black background, with swirly bits. The plasma balls that form the puzzles are one of (at the beginning, at least), three colours, all very distinct in terms of hue, all brighter than the background by far, all fairly saturated. The only part of the screen that isn’t terribly clear is the little menu button in the top right, and I fully expect that can be fixed quite quickly. I even trust Sometimes You will do it, too… They seem quite considerate like that.

Musically and visually, the game is, in a sense, dark as heck. The plasma balls aren’t, but the digital cats are all ferocious, the music pumping with square and saw waves, dark pieces of electronica that pulse to a seemingly authoritarian beat. Combined with the swirl behind the level select screen, it seems to cry “OBEY. OBEY YOUR CAT OVERLORDS.” I laughed, when I realised what dirty tricks the designer had put into level 6, which has almost every single little ball affecting both a row and a column, as clicking intersections shifts both by one colour. And I understood the logic behind it. 18 clicks, fuckers. I reckon that ain’t bad. Similarly, there’s a time attack, a level editor, and they’re all really accessible.

There… Really isn’t much more than this, so have another cat, this time from the title screen.

I like Energy Cycle. It’s hard not to, because it’s cheap, it’s simple, it’s accessible, and the developer still had room to put their own little stylistic touches in that I can say, without any fear, are theirs. For its price, for what it is, I’d say the game is exactly right. Fair dos, it’s not often I get to say that.

The Mad Welshman is totally not a front for your secret cat overlords. Meow.

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Source: Cash, ‘cos, like, I couldn’t not support the developers of this one!
Price: Iunno, it says £14.99 for the game, and, like, £18.99 for the game and the soundtrack and stuff?
Where To Get It: Well, Steam  has it, you should, like, totally check it out… If it’s your thing, y’know!

Okay, so, listen up. This is a game about, like, teens. Also spooky scary ghosts, but mostly teens. Y’know, with the awkwardness, and the sentences that are either, like, way contracted, or run on for ages and ages and ages… You, like, remember being one of those, right? Or maybe you are one? Y’know, when you’d say like, and y’know, and gaaaahd? Or be totally quiet? Oh, yeah, sometimes you’d forget words you totally use all the time, like… Well, totally!

See? Like, teen stuff, like Truth or Slaps, which is kinda like Truth or Dare, but with less butthole licking, like he said!

I’d like to tell you this is a game about happy endings. But that’s literally up to you. Like, literally. Your choices actually lead to things, because there’s only a small amount of things it can lead up to. And most of it has nothing to do with whether you, like, save the world, or whatever. Because it’s entirely possible you can do that. Although it’s also totally possible that none of it actually happened, or all of it happened, and, like, keeps happening, because timey wimey stuff is involved. Also it hella reminds me of The Fog… Oh, wait, you might not have seen the fog, it involved radios too, and creepy voices, and a shipwreck of some sort… Unless it’s the new one, in which case it was a bit weirder, and not as cool. But either way, things happen, and you kinda have to keep everything together when… Well, things really… Really aren’t together, do you get that?

Anyway, the point is that there are drama bombs, and if you’re not ready for those, or the fact that, y’know, it starts slow? Maybe this isn’t the game for you. Because these teens, they’re like… Their concerns are what you might call “Boring teen drama”, or you could, like, remember when all of that stuff was super important, I mean, universe endingly important. That’s kinda what I did, and I spent the whole game in various states of “Oh… My… GAAAAAHD!” or “OH NOES!”

This is, like, most of the teens, something like halfway through the night, I guess? I mean, look at how they’re tryin’ to be brave, and totally sucking at it!

Because the game definitely does a lot to give you a bad case of the Oh Noes. It, like, threatens your friends, or… Well, they’re not your friends, but they kinda are, because you’re a girl called Alex, even if, y’know, you’re not a girl, or a Person of Colour, which Alex also kinda is? Either way, it was really cool to see these teens being treated as… Well, people, not just scream queens or puppy princes or whatever. They make dumb choices, like eating space cakes at bad times, or bring out their drama, and half the drama comes from… Well, maybe they’re not all there in ways that aren’t related to those cookies that make you hungrier the more you eat them, y’get what I’m saying?

The game looks kinda cool, although it’s hard to see things on a big monitor, and the characters look kinda small, but that’s okay, because the island is really cool too, and the music that plays, all the sounds and voices and weird effects are good too, as is, like, how easy it is to work out how to use the radio to, y’know, do spooky things (because there are spooky radios), because when you get on the right frequency for, like, things to happen, something obvious usually comes with it, like a light, or triangles, or whatever.

I’ve only done one run through of the game so far (The game pulls a really, really mean trick to show multiple playthroughs. Like, what the hell, Night School, I was all “NUUUUUUUU!” when you pulled that!), and it took me, like, four whole hours to get through it once, but I liked it, and I’m gonna try and see what happens if I do things differently, because there’s, like, hidden achievements for drama choicey stuff and not-so-hidden achievements for finding letters and backstory and stuff, which would be cool, because your first time through, you’ll kinda be all “Whuuuuuhhhhhh?” for at least the first half, maybe more if, like, you don’t get it?

What Jonas is saying is, like, my reaction through, like, the ENTIRE game. With, y’know, a lot of “Oh cool!” too…

Article Translation/Summary: If you like adventure games along the lines of The Cave or the newer Telltale stuff, with well written teenagers being well written (And voice acted) teenagers in a spooky situation that, on your first run through at least, is going to leave you with lots of questions, then this is definitely a good purchase, and well worth checking out. Just be aware that the slow start is just a build up, and stick with it, you might find it worth it. Also please be aware that there is death and teenagers (rightly or wrongly) blaming each other for some of the shit they did, space cakes (That’s “hash” browns, emphasis on hash, to many others), and it is a horror game. Thanks for reading through what I felt was a fitting style of reviewing for the game!

The Mad Welshman is totes a cool dude who, like, isn’t a freak or a… Wait, are we even allowed to say freak anymo-ooooh, these cakes taste so good….

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £10.99
Where To Get It: Steam

Sometimes, you have games seemingly designed to encourage us never to leave this green earth again. Games which say “Space is so stupidly dangerous, there is literally no point in going up there.” Tharsis is one such game… And I don’t really think that’s so much intention as theorycrafting over testing.

No, you weren’t prepared. You weren’t prepared at all, and you’re going to die.

Make no mistake, Tharsis is beautiful. Digital paintings abound, the Tharsis itself doesn’t look bad by any stretch of the imagination, and the UI, while not as helpful as it could be, is laid out well. The music, similarly, hits the right note, with the cutscene music’s mood of “We are fucked” and the main game’s “Okay, but let’s go down working, eh?” It fits. Which makes the game’s core problem of… Er… The core all the more heartbreaking. Essentially, while on a mission to Mars to investigate a transmission, a micrometeoroid shower blows up one of your modules, setting off a cascade of problems, and killing two of your crew, leaving you four crew, and… Well, an ever growing list of potentially lethal problems on your mission. And that, right there, is both the thematic core of the game, and its core problem.

Simply put, there is never, ever enough work to go round. I wouldn’t mind it so much if it were a case of “Welp, I missed saving the ship by one die roll, I can do better next time!”, but it never is. It’s nearly always around 4 weeks in, with an absolute mess of sudden, critical, and life threatening problems. On “Normal” difficulty. And it seems to show how little thought went into the interaction between game elements that I cannot find a single way to get myself through this block. If I somehow had seven dice (out of a maximum of six), and managed to roll every single number on those dice once (Plus a 5) and got the right piece of research, I would be able to manage one out of five critical problems that arise. But this is also assuming, firstly, that I had seven out of six dice (An impossibility), secondly, that none of those six results were Void (Removes dice), Injury (Removes a health level from a crew member), or Stasis (Locks the number rolled), and, last but not least… It would be assuming it’s only one 20 odd dice problem, instead of… Er… Up to four.

Sometimes, your end is as ignominious as this. Others, it’s at least mercifully quick.

There are things that can sort of help, but they require dice to use, and usually specific numbers. Want some food to give one of your crew more dice next turn? This requires firstly, that nothing else life threatening is distracting you (Good luck with that), and secondly, that you get… Er… At least two dice with the same number. Assuming, of course, that you have two spare dice to go around. There’s more, of course, but it all comes back to the same core problem: You simply do not have enough dice to even attempt anything but prayer. In a sense, this is fitting with the mood the game is trying to portray. You will not win this game through strategy, because the dice are the true arbiter of whether you survive a turn. On the one hand, it’s relatively quick. On the other, once you’ve won it once, there’s really not much incentive to come back, as the story, and the ship remain the same. All that changes is the crew (Four members, with most choices being unlockable through… Well, grind, basically. Did you research 800 things? Have a crew member choice!) the specific set of disasters you’re going to go through (Which come in flavours of “Will blow up bits of the ship”, “Will turn off those features you rarely use because you’re too busy stopping the ship from blowing up”, “Will take away food”, and “Will take away dice”), and the side projects, combination heal and harm decisions that might give you that edge you need… But it’s generally doubtful, and as the stress mounts, the decisions get worse, and the chance of fuckups costing heavily increases. Oh, just for reference, stress is the bar on the left of the character’s portrait. Research falls to the same problem: You do not have the dice to spare, most of the time.

Do I think it’s well designed in terms of trying to recreate a mood? Yes. Do I think anyone except the masochistic or those who explore thematic design principles will enjoy it? Jesus wept, no. Do I think it could be rebalanced to be less sadistic to appeal to a broader audience? Yes. Right now, however, it just isn’t that approachable. There’s a lot of potential clarity work to go in, there’s grind for questionable results, and this is basically a game about managing luck. Skill will usually get you 4-6 weeks in, but you’re going to need 10, and for that? RNJesus is your only real recourse. For the price it’s asking… I’m not really sure this would appeal very broadly.

There is rarely a good choice here. There is rarely a good choice *anywhere*

The Mad Welshman groaned as yet another monitor sparked in an alarming way. He was six weeks from retirement, dammit, this was meant to be an easy mission, and he couldn’t even get the satisfaction of recreating that one scene from Dark Star at the rate things were going!

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An amusingly apropos subheader sometimes, if you take out the apostrophe…

It’s amazing what slips by when you’re not looking in the right place. Sony, last October, apparently filed to try and trademark the somewhat broad and generic term “Let’s Play.” They haven’t got it yet, but it’s quite clearly referring to the practice of Let’s Playing, as the service it is trademarking is:

“Electronic transmission and streaming of video games via global and local computer networks; streaming of audio, visual, and audiovisual material via global and local computer networks”

A bit generic sounding even here. Anyways, since it was only discovered yesterday, by members of the NeoGAF forums, and it requires clarification before June on the part of Sony before its finalised, it’s merely something quixotic we can point to and say… “Huh!” Here’s at least a couple of reasons why.

It’s Rather Broad

As the definition stands, it can cover a multitude of commerical services and goods, including… Game trailers. Those are streamed electronically, and consist of, funnily enough, audio/visual material of video games. This is, at a guess, at least part of the reason why a clarification has been requested.

It’s Already In Use By Several Commercial Entities

This, potentially, is the real killer. The biggest competitor for the title, as far as I understand it, would be RoosterTeeth productions, who use the channel name as a specific brand (In fact, there was much amusement among the Something Awful Let’s Play community when the channel was grabbed before anyone thought of it), and, as far as I understand things, they would then have prior rights of usage. There is also the fact that many Let’s Players are commercial, and directly identify their service as “Let’s Play” already, even if we were not to take into account that RoosterTeeth specifically use it as a brand for their content. Not to mention… Er… Something Awful’s own “The Let’s Play Archive” (Where you can find at least one Let’s Play by yours truly. 😛 )

It’s A Common Phrase

While this might be less of a problem than you might think, the term Let’s Play has already entered common usage, and, as such, this might be a difficult one to enforce. None of these are insurmountable obstacles, but they are, nonetheless, obstacles, at least one of which has presumably hit Sony when they tried to trademark the term back in October.

But Why Do It?

Well, for all the talk of a sinister reason, this one’s actually somewhat hard to enforce. Not just due to the common and prior usage, but also because you can be providing a similar service without calling it “Let’s Play.” That’s even assuming it goes through. More commonly speculated is that it may be related to the streaming service they’re planning to roll out.

Either way, much virtual headshaking, and no real best wishes in the trademarking process there. After all, it is a silly trademark.

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Oh yay, we get to see more of this guy rather than a DM mode. The joy on my face is comparable to his.

So, back when I reviewed Sword Coast Legends, I said that, to give it a fair shake, I would return to it when DM Mode was updated, as was promised 10 days after release. I’ve already said that this was bad communication and planning, but I was willing to give it a chance. Indeed, many people who bought it, bought it because hey, it promised a DM mode. But development is fluid, and fluid, as we all know, has a nasty habit of getting on your nicest shirts if you’re not careful. Such is the case with Sword Coast Legends.

Community Pack 3 was meant to fix DM mode, or rather, add some basic functionality into it that was going to make it less restrictive and boring than it is now (You can put monsters down, and make basic quests, but that’s pretty much it. No dungeon modelling. No script, as such. No AI fuckery, beyond the absolute basics.) But, for whatever reason, a free expansion has instead been planned as the priority. And, again, it took until after the time had passed to state this.

So, let’s talk goodwill. Let’s talk about how it’s a finite resource, and how this is another fine example of companies failing to, or being pushed into (It is not yet clear.) making moves that drain that goodwill.

Firstly, this was not communicated until yesterday. Communication is important, and I can understand why the devs and publishers might sit on this news. After all, it’s happened many a time before. There would be an outcry. Unfortunately… Delaying an important communication like this gives a bad impression of everyone involved. It implies folks aren’t on top of things, or that All Is Not Well. This drains goodwill faster than “Whups, we fucked up, we are fixing it”, but some folks seem to believe that game fans, and indeed purchasers, have a short memory. Unfortunately, the opposite is true. In RPG and Strategy circles especially, folks remember the fuckups for a lot longer than you might think. I still remember how Dark Sun had a game breaking story bug, for example. Or how people reacted to Master of Orion 3. And I can look it up any time. This isn’t the first time I’ve said “Communicate better” either… See above.

Secondly, even with the mollification that it’s a free expansion, precisely because development is fluid… There is no guarantee CP3 will materialise. It relies upon the studio making sales. It relies upon the studio keeping up with the goodwill, and it relies, basically, upon more factors than just “We decided we wanted to focus elsewhere.” I invite the publishers and devs of Sword Coast Legends to remember Arkham Origins, which also decided to focus on DLC over fixing a core feature. That DLC was not free, it’s true. But already, people are reacting in a way that’s all too familiar to me. It’s been played out before, with many a game. It doesn’t help that the Rage of the Demons DLC will involve… Drizzt Do’Fucking’Urden. This is a goodwill draining move in and of itself, because… Drizzt being in anything more than a cameo role usually involves him dominating the plot, to the detriment of pretty much the rest of the story. Of course, I’ve had a few months to potentially bitch about that being a thing, but honestly, if the DM mode actually came first? I wouldn’t care about Drizzt.

I’d like to continue saying “The developers continue to support this game”, because, technically? Sure, an expansion is support, in that the game is being added to. But goodwill, and its companion, trust, are important. Games, as much as some folks like to pretend otherwise, are a popularity game: You can’t get a game sold unless people know about it, and you can’t keep selling or making games when nobody trusts you to deliver. Moves like this erode trust, so, for any other developers or publishers who read this?

Don’t do this. You can look up what happened to other games that did this, and the answer is never “They did well despite these decisions and lack of communication.” The My Alibi Glitch in Arkham Origins is alive and well. Blur never got a sequel. There’s an entire graveyard of games out there, whose epitaph reads “They squandered trust.” And there’s also a few allegorical hospital beds waiting for some bigger publishers who just keep squandering trust like this.

Don’t. Do this. You can be better than this, games industry.

You can read the CP3/Expansion post in question here , and the original announcement of the development plan here.

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