Senaste recensioner av zeno

Roguelikes* are generally a heavily underrated genre, and also paid ones rarely sell well because they compete with amazing free games that take years to complete. If you want something smaller, MidBoss provides lots of fun and original ideas, worth to try in general!

* I mean the traditional sense of the word, very different from the popular meaning -- permadeath is optional in most roguelikes including MidBoss.

It is great to finally see what is probably the most famous open source strategy game on Steam.

One complain is that I am generally used to playing roguelikes and other permadeath games, and that breaks the campaigns in Battle for Wesnoth for me somewhat. I do not know how often I am intended to save the game -- full permadeath is not a good choice because the game is clearly not designed for that (with the goals of scenarios often changing unpredictably in the middle), and the other extreme is saving after each attack (the game even allows you to save between attacks during the enemies' turns). I choose the anti-permadeath extreme, which makes the game not that challenging, but it is still very fun to play for the stories. Of course you can also play multiplayer, which does not have such problems. (For tactically challenging single player games, I prefer to play roguelikes, they make the intended challenge clear, and most of the best ones are free and open source too.)

This is a culturally important game, so I think it is good to play it yourself and form your own opinion.

However, I find the story of Portal rather annoying than fun, and its 3D nature makes it confusing to navigate. I like how it has inspired other games (especially 2D ones) to incorporate the portal mechanics, though.

The main difference between Invisible Inc the traditional roguelike formula is that you are playing a team of two (or more) characters, and the turn is based on action points, rather than moving in single steps. Still, this is a very well designed game, with everything that should be expected from a good roguelike, and many fresh elements (good stealth-based gameplay). Definitely recommended!

It is kind of roguelike-like game, but for a roguelike veteran, it is way too easy.

I did not expect much from this game. Farming simulator? It sounds like a game full of grinding, and grinding is boring, something that should not appear in a well designed game.

But it turns out that all the praise this game has received is deserved. Yes, it is kind of grindy, but at least it is clear about this, it does not pretend the grinding to be the challenge, as most RPGs do. Its mostly peaceful nature and charming world are very relaxing.

Your run is scored after two in-game years, which corresponds to about 100 hours of real time gameplay. This works perfectly: two years is what you need to attain most of the in-game goals, without doing repetitive stuff. I have played a bit more than that, but the game becomes quite repetitive after two years. Still, you get 100 hours of relaxing fun.

There appear to be some bugs: some random events supposed to happen during the morning (giant crops, farms animals breeding, variation in villager quests) did never happen during my run, even though I really tried. I suppose there is some bug in RNG (maybe because I have been playing the Linux/OSX version?)

The main mechanics in this game is wrapping -- you lock the screen, and then, when you cross the right edge of the screen, you appear on the left edge. I have seen people recommending this game, so I have decided to play it to check out what can be done with this mechanics. Unfortunately, as it turns out... not much can be done. The game is ~1 hour of puzzles which are not very interesting. Play the earlier game Perspective, which I believe was made by some of the same authors, and is also based on a kind of screen lock mechanics -- and much more innovative and fun (and free).

Derek Yu has combined the elements of two genres: roguelikes and platformers -- the result was Spelunky, which was not only a great game by itself, but also created a whole new genre.

Caveblazers is a bit similar to Spelunky -- it also combines roguelikes and platformers, and I think it does it even better. As for the roguelike aspects, it has a real inventory -- you collect rings/weapons/magic items and choose which ones to use, drink strange potions just as in traditional roguelikes, and the items and blessings synergize with other items and blessings in cool ways, just as it should be in a great roguelike. The platformer aspect is great too -- the gameplay is great, and enemies are challenging to fight. Overall, a great game.

One thing that is not perfect about Caveblazers is how some achievements will unlock extra items and blessings, which you can then find randomly in future plays, and are often more powerful than the "original" ones. This is the "bad" kind of metaprogression -- in a traditional roguelike, when you finally win, you know that in your first games you lost on the first level, and you know that the game you have won is exactly the same, and you have won because you have mastered it. Unlocking powerful items kind of weakens this feeling. But I do not think they change that much, and the game is still challenging with them (especially if you enable all the relics), so it is still cool.

I would say that the puzzles in this game can be roughly split into very different two kinds, let's call them 2D and 3D puzzles. There are some intermediate cases which combine aspects of both, but still, these kinds are very different.

The 2D puzzles are okay, but nothing special -- they are a bit like those puzzles found in newspapers (Sudoku etc.).

The 3D puzzles all depend on the 3D environment in some way. Even though there are several different kinds of these puzzles, I do not think these are very innovative either (after playing The Witness, I have played a small, much earlier game called Perspective, and despite its age it felt much more innovative... it seems Jonathan Blow even took the "glowing wire" system from there). I hate 3D games in general, they are much more confusing to navigate than 2D, and some of the puzzles in the Witness are especially confusing.

Overall, while The Braid (by the same developer) was innovative and great, I do not think this one is that great and innovative. The ending was especially annoying. In general, I prefer procedurally generated puzzles to ones designed by famous designers -- they feel more organic, and replayable. The endings says "great, you won, but what matters is the journey, not the destination, so play the game again", that would be appropriate in a procedurally generated puzzle where you would want to play again, but here, it makes no sense (even though I wholeheartedly agree that games should be about journey, not about the destination). I also do not like the 3D world, it seems to say "hey, even if the core of your game is 2D puzzles, you have to spend lots of money on making a 3D world if you want your game to be successful".

I have played this because I wanted to play something similar to Terraria, but different. If you have already played Terraria and want more, then I recommend this. But if you have not, I think Terraria is better designed -- I like how everything in Terraria happens in the same world (non-modality) compared to Starbound's missions happening in external worlds, fighting is less cool in Starbound (sometimes enemies stand in a way which makes it impossible to hurt me, sometimes I cannot hurt them -- it also happens in Terraria but somehow it is much more annoying here), the huge world spawning thousands of planets feels repetitive (especially the randomly generated quests), and some parts of the game do not feel well integrated (like building villages, starbases, your ships, or mecha -- you can do all of that, but it does not really provide much benefits for the main storyline). Still, Starbound is a great game.