Recent reviews by rdominick

"A dungeon crawler for tired people," the store page says, and I can see where they are coming from. The autobattles keep things snappy, there's no real penalty for a party wipe, and teleport scrolls keep maze navigation from becoming troublesome. (Too bad I didn't figure that out unti the last half hour.)

The truly labyrinthian level design was just getting to me -- it was using up all my resources just to get back to where new space was! -- and then bam! The game was over. A real snack-sized game, and better for it.

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This is the very essence of a Wizardry game, with a straightforward user interface making for smooth interactions. The entire user interface has been translated into English, barring some small messages here and there. Everything is quite understandable and playable, UI-wise. I have written a guide showing how to set up and use Universal Game Translator to translate scenario texts; find it in the community hub.

The game is sometimes capricious and cruel, though never by breaking its own rules. That's how Wizardry is. You learn how to advance, when to retreat, and when to reset the game (Control-F1) to avoid a terrible outcome. Don't feel bad about resetting; the game is practically made with that ability in mind.

There are 5 official scenarios and almost 120 user scenarios at this time. I have played for 62 hours and have not finished any one scenario. The amount of gameplay available here is, frankly, astonishing.

The official scenarios are set to be translated into English in the near future, after work on the scenario editor is completed. The devs have also indicated they are interested in doing DLC for Prisoners of the Battles and The Absence of Misericordia. Japanese-language scenarios are getting more and more of their text translated. I can't wait for the scenario editor to be released so that other regions can start making their own games. I know I can't wait to try it out.

If you like crawling dungeons, making maps, solving the occasional puzzle and having numbers go up, I can't recommend The Five Ordeals enough. It gets the "I've been playing since Wizardry 1" stamp of approval.

I love Zach-likes. A satisfying programming puzzle game works my brain like almost nothing else -- only programming is like it. Any tension in a Zach-like should come from the mechanics; in other words "how the hell do I do that?" Unfortunately, AAW is a game where I can't tell if the programming provides any tension because so many other things are getting in the way.

The game stars some random mechanist and Alan Turing, and takes place in the 1930s, in a place that is not our world and where clockwork automatons have been common for a while. The whole thing is so divorced from anything that actually involved Alan Turing that the name is just a reference. The game has dialog and story sequences because Zach-likes have those, but it doesn't know what to do with them, and technical details are either muddled or straight-up technobabble. Tutorials are iffy, sometimes incomprehensible, and sometimes straight-up missing out the info you need to understand how to use the tools they are giving you. The help system doesn't cover every gadget or concept. It's all just a muddle.

And we haven't even talked about the programming yet. You are basically building a flowchart with simple instructions. The screen is incredibly cluttered, and features way too many arrows that allow you to pop bits of the interface in and out. If you select an arrow or node you can edit what happens there in a little window, but it appears on the screen in sort of a random place, almost always obscuring something you will want to see. The representations of the mechanical pieces are SO LARGE and the UI so cramped that you can't see all of the mechanics and your program at the same time. You can do some neat things with the arrows, but the game never tells you that, and it doesn't look like the example in the (very vague) loop instructions.

As in most games of this type, you have an input, and an expected output. When you hit "play" it starts stepping through your program, showing how things go. After four inputs it automatically halts the display and just zooms through the rest of the cycles, which I think is one of the worst sins. Let me control how long it takes! It's so satisfying to see the machine you built go after a struggle and do what it needs to do, but nope! Zoom to the end! No serotonin for you!

I just can't recommend the game.

Caves of Qud is a roguelike game with all the dials turned up to 18 or 33 or something. Systems clicking together like clockwork, imagination smeared on every surface, surprises still lurking everywhere, Qud is a massive achievement. I have 43 hours in the game and I've barely scratched the surface; I just keep coming back and seeing what new madness has been added. Some day I'll sit down and make a serious run at it, but it's already very much one of the most worthwhile games in my collection.

An excellent small hidden object game with wonderfully detailed art. Small variations from the usual HO gameplay switch things up. Has one of the cutest meet-cutes in video games. Unfortunately, it seems to run out of steam after the protagonist reaches maybe 30? Still, a beautiful way to spend 15-20 minutes.

Finally, 3D modelling software I can understand!

Updated: 2/14/2021

After being away from Crocotile for a bit, I come back to two wonderful updates. One is that the whole UI is contained in one window now, which makes it possible for me to work with Crocotile over the Steam Link. The other is that reverse sides of quads are drawn as wireframe blanks, which is huge for usability.

An excellent example of the Japanese video board game genre -- like, say, Fortune Street, Amiibo Festival, 100% Orange Juice, Culdcept and the like. This one shakes up a lot of those concepts, puts them down on a chibi map of Japan, mixes in some kaiju, and lets it roll.

A 2P+2AI game took just over an hour and a half, and it flew by. Looking forward to playing more!

Legioncraft is an interesting puzzle. Your main unit Katamaris/Tetrises up other units to form a Legion, and then you battle other Legions. You can't just glom together any old units; you have to think about their position, about how big they are making your Legion, how their runes will spread and reinforce each other. You also have to think about who is being exposed to attack as you combat other legions. Sometimes, it will all go sideways, so it's best not to get too attached to any one unit.

It's an early access title, so there are some rough edges. The English translation can be a bit obtuse at times. The difficulty can be a little uneven, and you have to be cool with just having a doomed run from time to time. The loyalty mechanics are obscure, at best.

There's a good foundation here, and the game is fun and compelling in that one-more-run kind of way. We are getting quick updates. Currently, 3 out of 11 planned worlds are implemented, so lots more content is coming, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it grows.

One of the best whim purchases I've made for a while. I might not have seen it except for @microtrailers on Twitter.

Grid Cartographer is a useful multi-purpose tool. It can be used to draw all sorts of maps for tabletop RPGs and games, to provide auto-mapping functions for a set of older RPGs that don't provide them, and as a game development tool, to lay out levels. (A Vaporum dev posted a screenshot recently that showed them laying out a dungeon for the sequel in GC4.)

I use it mainly for game development. The game I am working on has tile-based maps, and the editor quickly and easily imports tile sheets, allows you to work with maps of any size, and allows the placement of annotations on a per-square basis.

Then there's exporting your data. The possibilities it offers for this are pretty incredible; there's a default XML output that is perfectly fine, but if you really want to get things just so, you can write up your own scripts. The scripts run in essentially a tiny virtual computer, like using an old 8086 DOS machine with a CGA display. They can be quick command-line jobs, or there is an API for making character-based GUIs, or you can use ANSI encoding, or you can completely roll your own by poking character and attribute values directly into the display RAM.

The game I'm working on now has scripts that can be assigned to a range of cells on the map, tagged as to their use. I've written an editor for these scripts that automatically creates new, empty scripts when I add a script note on the map, saves local files, and manages exporting new maps and scripts into my project's directory. I can switch over to GC4, edit a map, export it, and bounce back to Godot and see the changes pretty much immediately. Because of the flexibility of the scripting, I can do pretty much anything map-related in GC4, even if the functionality isn't built into the app itself. All of the APIs are documented on the GC website.

Also, the developer is incredibly responsive with help and to suggestions, and very much wants to support users of all types. He's implemented a couple of APIs so I could make my toolset do what I wanted it to do, which is pretty amazing.

GC4 is one of the best development-related purchases I've made in a long time.

(PS: someone please tell me to stop messing about with the port of Rogue I've been working on for the GC4 console. Please?)