HIGH Tutorials that help me get better at Lumines.

LOW Visual overload can make it hard to focus.

WTF How is the soundtrack this good?

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi everyone, Eugene Sax here with another review from GameCritics.com.

I haven’t played a lot of Lumines, historically.

The remastered version from 2018 was my first intro to the series, and honestly… well, I didn’t really enjoy that first pass at it. It felt too loud, both audio and visually, and I couldn’t wrap my head around the horizontal puzzle style. Knowing that the people behind Tetris Effect were also behind Lumines, though, I wanted to give it another shot and see if this new entry was a better way to get into this franchise.

Mea culpa, Lumines — I was wrong about you. (At least in some ways.)

Lumines: Arise is a block dropping puzzle in conversation with Tetris, but rather than the classic tetrominos filling horizontal lines, it instead focuses on asking the player to create 2×2 blocks anywhere on a horizontal plane. Blocks drop from the top of the screen, and players need to move them around in order to create 2×2, 3×3, or larger, in order to score points. A “timeline” moves across the screen and erases any complete blocks it comes across, clearing more room for players to create more blocks, and so on. There is also a rare “chain block” that will allow all linked blocks of the same color to be erased from the timeline, even if they’re not in the shape of a square.

The big mechanical addition to this version is “burst”.

As players create blocks, a meter will fill at the top of the playfield. At any point, players will be able to activate the burst, which then stops blocks from falling for a few moments. If players can create a block during this burst period, it will cause blocks of the opposite color to fly above the screen. Players can continue and make more fly up. All of those blocks come rushing back down once the burst is over, then creating a large chunk of squares to combo with.

Gameplay is broken up into a couple of modes for Arise.

Journey takes players through sets of stages (four or five, normally) with increasing difficulty as things progress. Playlist mode allows players to combine their favorite stages together in a custom order to play, or just to watch if they want to take in the visuals and music. Lastly, there’s multiplayer, which consists of some solo leaderboard competition or battle modes.

I also will shout out the tutorials specifically as Arise tailors them to new players and gives small missions that make it easy to understand and learn not only how to play, but also how to grasp more advanced techniques. These tutorials made me better in a way other puzzle titles haven’t.

At this point in the review, it feels a little like burying the lead to only just now mention the visuals and the music.

Since each stage only has two colors players need to match, this mechanical simplicity allows for some creative and striking ways to keep the play field visually interesting, and the developers lean hard into delivering over-the-top sound and graphics, far above what you might expect for a puzzle title.

One in particular that I enjoyed was a food-themed level. Blocks started as red apples and green melons, but then changed to broccoli and tomatoes as I got further in, while classical string music played in the background. Another had orbs of fish and hermit crab shells that changed color to reflect the sun setting on the beach landscape behind the playfield while listening to slow, smooth pop vocals. The visuals and music combine masterfully to pull players into Arise on a level above just block-matching, and it eats up time in a way that hasn’t happened to me in a long while.

With that said, some of the levels do get overwhelming as previous versions of the game. However, there is a moment of pause and the music fades out between each song, giving a welcome break to catch your breath and reset before going into the next stage. There are also a wealth of accessibility options that allow players to adjust any of the visual stimuli including background effects, particle effects on the playfield, and so on. If it’s too much to take in visually, it can be turned down.

While my memories of playing it in the past weren’t great, the masterful music and visual presence combined in Lumines: Arise really turned me around on the series. It’s not one to miss!

For me, Lumines: Arise gets 8.5 blocks exploding into glitter out of 10.

Disclosures: This game is developed by Enhance and Monstars, Inc. and published by Enhance. It is currently available on PS5, PSVR2 and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 6.5 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. Around 1 hour was spent in multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated E and contains Mild Fantasy Violence.  The blocks will explode into particles on screen, fantasy violence amounts to spiders and snakes that fight each other in the background (but these can be turned off in accessibility menus).

Colorblind Modes: There are multiple colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: Sound is not needed to complete the game. Captions for character dialogue can be resized. The game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: The controls are completely remappable.

The post Lumines Arise VIDEO Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Playful environments and cute co-op puzzles.

LOW Clunky movement and not enough puzzle variation.

WTF How did two bricks make me tear up like this?

Hi everyone! Eugene Sax here with another review from GameCritics.com!

With so many games that focus on offering hardcore action and explosions, I find myself occasionally searching for something a little more laid back. LEGO Voyagers is absolutely in that camp, and my wife and I had a great time in its meticulously crafted world — this is a co-op–only experience that focuses more on exploration than adrenaline, and it’s great.

Two LEGO brick friends are on an island together, dreaming of space travel because they live so close to a rocket launch site. After watching a rocket crash-land near the island, players control this pair of single-bricks as they solve puzzles and salvage the abandoned spaceship parts. Platforming and puzzles combine together in completely LEGO-fied world that will lead players through canyons, factories, forests, and more. 

These little bricks will jump, roll, and attach to larger LEGO pieces while on the hunt for the crashed rocket parts. While most of the puzzles they’ll need to solve to earn these pieces are simple, they’re effective in how they integrate into each level, and how they utilize multiplayer functions into the challenges.

For example, one puzzle had me control some platforms, flipping them between horizontal and vertical, while my wife had to use another by leveraging momentum. In other parts of the adventure there are vehicles that transport LEGOs to complete a puzzle. Working together with a partner to drive a truck (one steering, the other controlling speed) made for an enjoyable comedy of errors, and was ultimately satisfying when we finally got the truck where it needed to go. 

While my wife and I absolutely had a good time with LEGO Voyagers, there’s no denying that it’s a bit on the shallow end since many of the puzzles amount to repeating the same challenges — finding blocks to make a bridge, to complete a road, and so on.

Some of the puzzles feel a little misjudged, as well. Some took too long, some were too awkward, and some were both. The vehicle puzzles I just mentioned, while amusing, ended up also being annoying due to how long some of the sequences went on.

There were also some puzzles that were difficult thanks to their execution. In the factory, for example, I controlled a crane magnet that could pick up specific LEGOs. My wife had to pick up the correct piece with her character, wait for the me to pick it up and put them on a different conveyor belt so she could grab more LEGOs, and then I had to pick them all up again to go to a third location. Controlling all of those pieces plus my wife felt awkward and took much longer than it should have.

Ultimately, Voyagers lands in a weird place for me as far as recommending it goes, and also with who I would recommend it for. The simplicity and repetition of the experience means it’s hard to recommend to older players who might be looking for a little more meat on the bone. On the other hand, it might not be right for a younger audience due to the execution issues with some of the puzzles. Despite landing in this mixed middle ground, I did have an enjoyable time with my wife, and we walked away with fond memories of it, so for me Lego Voyagers gets 6.5 stuck together bricks out of 10.

Rating: 6.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Light Brick Studio and published by Annapurna Interactive. It is currently available on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 3 hours of play were spent playing the game, and the game was completed. The game must be played completely in multiplayer.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated E. No specific disclosures here, just a couple of people roaming around as Lego bricks in a Lego world. Good for all ages!

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There is no text in-game. Audio is not needed for gameplay. The game is fully accessible.

Controls: Controls are not remappable, and there is no control diagram. Players will move with the left stick, jump with A, attach and detach to blocks with X, and make noises with B (not required for gameplay completion).

The post LEGO Voyagers VIDEO Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

Daniel Weissenberger sits down to chat with John and Rob Doncan — the two-man group behind development studio Bad Viking. They released Strange Horticulture in 2022 to rave reviews, and now they’re on the verge of releasing their new title, Strange Antiquities. We chat about design, how puzzles fit into a world with items, and which cat is best. Be sure to keep an eye out for Strange Antiquities which releases September 17th for Steam and Switch!

TRANSCRIPT:

GameCritics.com: Today on GameCritics, we’re talking to Bad Vikings John and Rob Doncan. The developers responsible for the instant classic puzzle game Strange Horticulture. Their new game, Strange Antiquities, is a sequel of sorts set in the same world, but moving the action to a shop for rare and mysterious artifacts. All right, we’re joined today by John and Rob, the two man developer team responsible for the Strange franchise. Is that what you guys refer to it as?

Rob: Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s what we’d call it. Yeah. 

GC: In 2022, they gave us Strange Horticulture, a game about sorting and finding rare and mysterious plants. And now upcoming is the sequel, Strange Antiquities. So, can I start right at the beginning? What were your big influences in kicking off the Strange franchise? Like I can go to your website and look at your library and there’s a lot of action games in there and if I looked at the end of the four games you made beforehand. Strange Horticulture is quite a departure. 

Rob: Yeah, it it is. But there’s like… there is history there as well. Like you know kind of point and click games we played growing up and we made a couple of those as well. So kind of puzzly stuff was always in our blood, I think. You know, we… we grew up with games like Mist and Riven and, in particular the Discworld series as well. We loved those games, which obviously kind of more humor, than we necessarily have ended up doing here. But yeah, so I think there is, you know, there’s some history there. And then another thing that we were really inspired by was board games. So I mean you might be able to see behind me.

GC: Katan and Gloomhaven. 

Rob: Yeah, got a little board game collection going on here. So I think specifically stuff like Eldritch Horror and there’s a game called Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective which you have, if you haven’t played, there’s a similar sort of map mechanic in it where you go around London solving crimes. And so we kind of borrowed that slightly for Strange Horticulture. Obviously, there’s a map in it and you can… you solve puzzles to find your way around to find plants and and uncover the story, that sort of stuff. So yeah, board games, old adventure games and point and click games and puzzle games kind of always been there for us. 

GC: Okay. 

John: Yeah. I think I think… I think with… basically when we came to making Strange Horticulture, we were sort of… we’ve been toying around with loads of ideas for like a year. We kind of had a bit of a failure when we tried to make a sort of artillery game for Steam that didn’t do so well. And we were… we were toying with a board game idea. We were toying with a point and click adventure game set in a town called Undermere. And then it was Rob who came he he went out one day on a dog walk and came back saying I’ve seen an advert for some gardening company or I don’t know what it was exactly but he he he I think it had the word “horticulture” in it and he came back and he pitched he said I’ve had an idea called Strange Horticulture and it’s like about running an occult plant shop and what do you think and I I just said you know what that sounds really cool can we let’s make that game ’cause you know we we we hadn’t latched on to anything in a kind any kind of strong way. We… and we were desperate for a kind of… like… you know something some kind of source of inspiration and that just seemed really cool like I I could instantly kind of see something in that. So we dropped everything else and then it’s funny how like you start borrowing things. If you take the setting from the point and click game that we were sort of half working on, the map from Rob says Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, but we’d actually put that into our own little board game thing. And we took… we took that from there and and suddenly we built up this kind of world and obviously we’re just a two man team so we’re like let’s try and keep you know play to our strengths. We really liked the concept of the what they’ done with… what Lucas Pope had done with Papers, Please and having it all on one screen and kind of the tactile feel of the you know stamping documents and opening books and things like that. And we were like that could work really nicely here and having it in a single sort of screen layout. So let’s borrow that kind of game design. But like you’re… you’re studying books and studying law and and trying to find out about plants and yeah, it’s amazing how these kinds of things (work) together. But yeah, if you look at our sort of game history, it’s not the most obvious like of moves, but sometimes you got to move in tangents in this industry and hey, look, now we’re making strange games and having fun with it. 

GC: Oh man. Okay. Now here’s just a game… just a question about playing the game. Am I not playing it right if the minute I started I turned on auto-label? 

Rob: No, I mean look, that’s obviously we kind of know that there’s a subset of people that are going to love labeling their plants and it’s really interesting. We’ve watched a lot of playthroughs, particularly of people playing the demo of Strange Antiquities. Um, and there’s a lot of people who see the popup saying, you can turn on autolabeling if if labeling items isn’t your thing. And a lot of people who say, “No, it really is my thing. I don’t want to turn on autolabeling.” And then equally, there’s a lot of people who say, “Yeah, it’s not my thing. It’s not for me.” And they turn it on. So, yeah, I don’t know what the split is necessarily. Like it kind… I think this kind of game does appeal to people who like sort of organizing stuff, but it’s not that’s not what it’s about. That’s kind of a a side quest if you like, but yeah, you’re not cheating if you turn on auto labeling. That’s why we put it there. 

John: Yeah. But it was always our intention to offer that side of it. It’s like, you know, for people that want to arrange their shelves how they want to arrange them and they want to give each… each plant or each item its own label, you know, there’s something kind of quite fun about that in a weird kind of… like organizational way. Like I think some people get a lot out of that. So, it’s definitely Yeah, it’s just two types of player and some people want to turn them auto labeling on and others would rather label their own plants. And which… either camp you’re in, we just offer different… that play style to both. And it’s up to you. And that’s the great thing about being able to choose.

Rob: The… I will say that the steam thread of how to arrange your plants on Strange Horticulture is the longest thread in the whole back end… in the whole discussion section. So yeah, people get quite into it. The favorite… my favorite one that someone posted was that they arranged them by smell so the nice… the nice smelling ones are near the customers as they come in. 

GC: That’s fantastic. Sorry, that’s very good. It did not occur to me with No, I… I will say that I would have had a much easier time in the endgame if I had sorted them all by what kind of thematic resonance they gave off early in the game. 

Rob: Right. Yeah. 

GC: Like if there’s one tip to make the game a lot easier, it’s the minute you get that lens, put on the labels what kind of… what kind of resonance they have ’cause that is going to save you a ton of time. 

Rob: Yeah. Yeah. yeah. I think again some people are kind of naturally more organizational and they’ll just do that instinctively. Again, you see it watching people just playing the demo that, you know, different labeling systems. Some people are really organized and other people are just chaotic. I think John and I, well certainly me, I would be in the more chaotic camp. 

John: Yeah. I mean I was I… I think… I don’t think I’ve ever even put on auto labels or done any labeling, but that’s because I know I know the item sort of off by heart. So I just like where’s my thingy? Yeah, I’ll go find that. So yeah, like I think if I was playing it myself from scratch, I’d be an auto labeler to be honest. 

GC: Okay, good. I’m not alone. Is that a real cat’s purr on the soundtrack? 

Rob: I assume so. It’s a licensed sound effect. So…

JOhn: It certainly will be a real cat’s pur.

Rob: I’d be surprised if it’s not… not my, not our cats, though. 

GC: (I’m) really wondering if you recorded it live. 

Rob: That would have been cool. Yeah. 

GC: Is it the same purr in both games? 

Rob: No. A new purr for a new cat. 

GC: Okay. Alright. It sounded different to me. I just had no idea if that was just my ears playing tricks. Alright, at what point did you start coming up with the idea of doing Strange Antiquities? Were you… Did it happen during the development of Strange Horticulture or after it was finished? 

John: Oh, after like we… Strange Horticulture was like… We were so focused on Strange Horticulture all the way through like we didn’t even think about what to do after ’cause we had no idea like how it was going to be received or anything like that. So the focus was entirely let’s get make for us it was about making the best game that we could with our resources. I mean one of the kind of ideas we had during development was let’s make try and make somebody’s favorite game. That was like a concept we were… we were working with rather than trying to make something that’s like going to make loads of money or is going to be critically acclaimed or let’s make one person’s favorite game and see where it goes. So we… we tried that. We made the best game we possibly could and then we released it and gosh the reception was so much bigger than anything we could have imagined like in terms of the feedback, the reviews the audience were they just seem to really enjoy it. And so after that we were like well makes sort of sense to do another strange game I think. Um, and we still felt we had more stories to tell in Undermere. 

Rob: …but we kind of felt like we… we’d maybe exhausted like, not exhausted, but we put all our best plant ideas into Strange Horticulture and we wanted to try something a bit different. So, I don’t think we thought too much. Correct me if I’m wrong, John, but I don’t think we took too long to decide it was going to be Antiquities. I think that strange like occult artifacts kind of made sense to us pretty quickly.

John: Yeah, we were brainstorming ideas for a follow-up. And honestly, it was quite a short list. I think it was like sort of occult items, cryptic creatures, there might have been something else, but basically the natural progression for us felt like yeah, antiquities. Yeah, you know, you go into museums and there’s cursed items and items about witchcraft and all sorts of that. So, it… it works in the world really well. 

GC: Okay. Next question. Now, you’ve already mentioned and gave a wonderful shout out to Papers, Please, Lucas Pope’s just amazing simulator. Were there any other games that really you felt influenced you in designing this one? 

Rob: I mean that Papers Please was definitely the biggest one I think. I mean although it’s interesting we probably get compared more to Lucas Pope’s other big game, the Return to Obra Dinn. 

GC: Return. Yeah. 

Rob: Because the gameplay is perhaps more similar to that… that sort of deductive reasoning.

GC: …looking at all of the oblique clues to put together the answer. 

Rob: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. but that wasn’t really intentional. we kind of yeah that just sort of happened. but yeah I I can’t think of any other specific games that we were in by..

John: I think thematically we you know we had come across things like Cultist Simulator and Fallen London games and things like that and we sort of we we didn’t… Rob’s played Cultist Simulator, I haven’t played these games, but it… it was kind of like looking into those kind of like cultish occult things, we just felt like there was something cool there. And when we started and that was like always the idea, right? It was going to be occult plants. And then we started researching it and kind of looking into it more and you kind of come across things like well in the 15th century that there was a famous botanist in the in in Britain called Nicholas Culpepper and he wrote something called complete herbal which was like a guide to like pharmaceutical plant use and and other uses you know mystical uses more spiritual uses I guess and you sort of get we got a copy of it and you kind of go oh it’s got the plant. The sketch of the plant and like a description of the plant and then what does it do? And you know it can be how from like settling stomach to warding off spirits. And we were like that’s… that’s really cool. Like why don’t we just take that kind of concept and just you know go our go even more sort of supernaturally occulty like fun with it. and that’s kind of what we did. So yeah, those are the kinds of things we were inspired by. less probably like specific games just…

Rob: There was also well as I mentioned earlier the board games but there was also a game called Coffee Talk which itself was kind of inspired by Papers, Please and a game called Va-11 Hall-A, I assume as well which… Coffee Talk is about you know being a barista in a kind of fantasy setting not sure what you’d call it exactly but that that kind of taught us that you can have this kind of slower paced game play. and like it can be kind of chilled and you know it doesn’t… doesn’t need to be fast-paced or frantic or anything like that. You can do quite a lot with a little. 

GC: Okay. Yeah. All right. On the website for the game, Rob is listed as coding and designing. John is doing the art and designing. Who is writing the character dialogue and book entries because there’s so many of them in the game. 

Rob: Yeah, true. Well, that’s Yeah, that’s pretty much all me. Oviously with some help from John as well. And actually John’s wife wrote some of the like flavor text for some of the locations that you can visit in the first game, I believe. 

John: I think… Well, yeah, we sat down together, Steph and I, and just like just took locations and just started writing descriptions and stuff. So, yeah, I think most when I say game design is, you know, it’s a collaborative process and that includes things like the story, we we we come up with some ideas, we we talk about it like and then but most of the writing is definitely Rob’s side of it, but that doesn’t mean to say I don’t get involved. I’ve… I’ve done a few little bits in the game like I think most of the epilogue entries I think are more me in… in the game. So it is a collaborative process. it’s just our main roles are art and code and then we also have loads of other hats that we put on, you know, like sound design, animator, narrative designer, marketing, social media, community stuff. We do… we do so much just as just the two of us. 

GC: Okay. All right. So specifically about the text, what challenges did you face in coming up with the kind of word puzzles that are in the entries? I have to imagine it’s kind of difficult writing these entries that tow the line between legitimately sounding like a description of the item and the history of the item without just giving away what it is… 

Rob: Right? Yeah. Yeah. Very challenging. And much more challenging designing those puzzles on strange antiquities than it was on Strange Horticulture. Partly because obviously plants all share similar properties, right? So you can describe a plant’s leaves as being heart-shaped or whatever and that could apply to any plant and you have to go and check all of your plants on your shelf and see if they have heart-shaped leaves. Whereas you can’t really do that with items. Like if you say it has a handle or whatever then okay yeah that could apply to a couple of items but not many. If you say well yeah so it’s about like trying to use those broader terms. So trying to… trying to find those broader descriptive terms. So like using the material maybe or you know we might say it’s a pendant or it’s a totem or something. You’ve got lots of those on your shelves. So that’s kind of what we try and do is… is give a broader descriptive clue or maybe try and use a sketch or something like that that could apply to more than one item. And then we’ll try and have other clues peppered in there that will help you narrow it down. where you might have to use some other tools to help you do that. So, you might have to inspect the item in some way, see if it makes a sound or has a threatening aura or something like that. Or you might have to weigh it or use some other items in your shop to kind of help you get there. But yeah, that was… that was certainly a challenge this time round. But I think by working through that challenge, we perhaps came up with some more interesting ideas this time around, and hopefully some more interesting puzzles came out of that process.

John: Yeah, I mean it took longer like… the process way longer than in Strange Horticulture to come up with one all these items visually like plants because they’re similar. You… I just started drawing plants and then you just draw the next one and you kind of find some way of comparing them and making (them) interesting. It’s almost like we designed the puzzles first and then designed the items and then… then you also have to come back and try and throw in little bits of red herrings for other puzzles. And like it’s, you know, it’s about creating a putting in a few clues into the description like as Rob said, one that’s a broader sort of clue, one that’s more of a like narrow it down and a clincher. And but also making it sort of vague enough and interesting enough and appealing enough law-wise that it sort of like it has this richness to it in the game as well. So it’s… it’s an incredibly difficult process. I think it… it’s when we come up with a way that’s to do a puzzle that is unique and completely different to how you’re used to kind of using your book looking for and those are the ones which are, I think, land the best on the player as well. So the more of those we can put in the better really. 

Rob: And some of my favorite ones are the ones where it’s like one small sentence. So you… you know you get ones that are like have three or four quite maybe disguised clues but like…

GC: The insanity card where it’s just like I don’t know what the entry is something (like) “This is as mysterious as insanity in the mind itself.” Thanks. Hugely helpful. 

Rob: Doesn’t give you much to go on, but then you know once you crack it, I think…

GC: Very satisfying. Exactly. 

Rob: Right. Yeah. Great. 

GC: How much and well when you’re writing tests… texts this complex to work as puzzles, how much testing of that do you have to do, right? Do you have people you’d normally test this stuff on? 

Rob: Yeah, I mean obviously as as much as possible is the answer, but that is hard because well one of the biggest problems that we face with a game like this is that it doesn’t really fall into place until quite close to the end of the game like end of development in the sense that as John says you know in designing the items one item on its own is not a puzzle. You need 10 items on your shelf that you haven’t identified yet so that there can be ones to compare it against. So until you’ve kind of designed those other items that might be red herrings, you know, you can’t and… you’ve designed the… the tools to identify these items, you can’t show it to someone and say, “Is this working or isn’t it?” So yeah, that obviously came quite late in development. 

GC: You have to make the game before you know if it’s any good. 

John: Yeah, basically. Yeah. Yeah, it’s not a game that we could like… Even with Strange Horticulture, it’s not a game that we were able to prototype and sort of and test out on people and say, “Does this work?” We… we just had to go with sort of like a gut instinct and and as you say, just basically make the game and then try it out on people and hope that it works…

Rob: But obviously once then once you do try it out on people, you find out, okay, this one is too hard, this one’s too easy or whatever. And then you can kind of go back in and tweak them all and add in more red herrings where required or clarify certain bits here and there. So we’ve done a lot of that obviously and that’s where yeah play testers come into it. 

John: Yeah, especially like you know we… when we launched the demo one of the things obviously it’s only the first two days but all those are the… the easier side of the puzzle. So it’s, you know, we can see how people are interacting with it, where the points of friction are, try and smooth it through, and then you kind of go, okay, that’s how they’re playing. Is there anything else we need to do further up in the game? Like that will just ease people’s frictions. And we’re never going to get it perfect. Like we… we try our hardest to balance the game as as well as we can. Like not too easy, not too hard. You know, I always sort of try and lean towards making it hard and then we realize we’ve we it’s too hard. We got to go… have to go back the other way. But then we were… we were discussing some feedback and a puzzle yesterday and Rob found a quote by Ron Gilbert who did um… 

GC: Monkey Island.

John: Yeah. And he was like, you know, stick stick to hard basically. I can’t remember exactly what it was. 

Rob: He said yeah he is on the side of making it too hard. What he doesn’t want to do is like, you know, if… if you’ve given the players the tools to work something out and there’s a wrench on the table was his specific quote. Don’t be tempted to make the wrench bounce up and down and flash in their face ‘cause part of the fun of these kind of games is figuring that stuff out for yourself. And you know not… you don’t have to make every puzzle easier. It’s just the ones where you know if… if every single play tester trips up on it, that’s obviously you know that’s a flag. But you know some… some things some people are going to find a bit harder and some people will breeze through it and that’s okay. 

John: But it’s about creating those aha moments where you know where you… you know if it’s too easy you don’t get that reward. If it and it’s if it’s too hard, you also and it doesn’t really make sense, you don’t get that reward. But if it’s hard enough that you can work it out and then you do work it out, the sense of satisfaction you get from that is much greater. 

GC: Oh, I agree completely. There’s a lot of really satisfying moments in the game. There’s some… there’s some tough ones, but when you figure it out, it just feels fantastic. 

Rob: Awesome. 

GC: I was thinking about one particularly difficult one, but I’m not going to spoil it here. I tell you later. All right. Do you guys each have a favorite character in the game? 

Rob: For me, I think it’s got to be Verona Green. Partly because she is a returning character from Strange Horticulture. So, if you played that game, you might recognize her. And I mean, she’s kind of… she’s pretty central in both games. She’s… she’s kind of half based on a kind of Granny Weatherwax sort of character from Discworld, if you’re familiar with her. She’s just… Yeah, she’s kind of the… the beating heart of Undermere. I think she kind of keeps everything ticking over. 

John: I mean, like, it would be remiss if I said my favorite character wasn’t the cat because my favorite character is the cat, you know? He’s the central kind of character throughout the game. Well, both games, obviously. It’s a different cat now. But he’s the constant throughout like, he’s always there. He’s minding his own business. You know, he runs the place basically. You, you’re just like… so yeah definitely I would say the cat Jupiter.

GC: Okay. Yeah, one thing I did love about Jupiter is when he’s napping if you hit the… if you hit the bell, of course he’s alarmed that you woke him up but if you pet him first he’ll be awake and he won’t mind the bell.

John: Yeah that’s like something from Strange Horticulture which was a happy accident just how it was set up like and then people loved it or found it, found out about it and loved it so much and then when we released the demo it didn’t have that and people were like excuse me can you fix that please!

Rob: We added that back in. 

GC: Fantastic! Do you have a favorite one of the items in the game?

Rob: I think I’m going to go with an item called the Bloodbeck which I have to be careful here to not give away any sort of puzzle. But it is this kind of mysterious item that has whispered voices and you don’t know if they’re the voices of the dead or the voices of the mysterious nameless gods.

John: I mean honestly, I don’t know the items like inherently by name or by what they do but I do like as the artist is… is for me it’s how they resonate visually. So, I can say like my favorites there are like there’s a wooden doll item with some markings on his head, which I’ve… I don’t know why. I’ve just always liked it. Like I think it’s cool. It could… I can see it in a museum or something. And there’s also one which has… is it’s like a… a sort of doll, a wooden doll with earrings and a big…

GC:  …Disc headdress on top. 

John: Yeah. Yeah. I just… I just like it those… those ones visually like I don’t know. Like and so when… when I did some stickers for Strange Horticulture for Gamescom recently those… those are ones that got printed up. So yeah like um…

GC: Okay. Yeah, there they are. And of course the skull and the flower that use… 

John: Well, that’s kind of in the game’s loading screen. 

Rob: Yeah, it’s quite an iconic one. 

John: Yeah, it became like early on it it was one of the sort of earlier designs and it became like kind of the the insignia for the game like the emblem and…and so it’s… it’s kind of on the the Steam small banner and we kind we kind of use it as our kind of icon I guess. 

GC: Yeah. No, it… it’s quite an image because it ties things of course back to Strange Horticulture. You got the plant right there. 

John: That’s it. There’s a little bit of that and I think like the kind of skull and like the way it is it kind of feels occult and so which it’s a cool… it’s just a cool design. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. 

GC: All right. Now, here’s a question. How did you decide on the yacht dice minigame as a way of punishing players for just random clicking? 

Rob: That was… I’m not sure exactly where that idea came from. Well, so we had something similar in Strange Horticulture where yeah, if you fill up your rising dread meter, we call it and you get a game over. You have a little puzzle to solve to get back in. And we got some really good feedback on that. Some players really loved it. And then I think the players that hit it quite a lot found it quite frustrating that they were just doing the same puzzle over and over again, which yeah, fair enough. We… we take that on board. So we wanted to do something that could be more replayable. Which is a real challenge when you want it to be something quite simple like not take too long and get you back into the game you know within a minute or two, max 5 minutes, something like that. So yeah it went through quite a few iterations but I think we went with a dice game partly because again inspired by board games and those kind of mechanics. Partly because I think visually it’s… it looks cool having, you know, the 3D dice in there, I think it works really well. And partly because it introduces a luck factor. So, there’s that kind of randomizing element. But then balancing that and making sure because the first iteration we did of it, we, you know, we sent it off to our publishers and like, oh, what do you think of this? And they absolutely hated it because it was just way too hard. And they were just getting so frustrated that they couldn’t just get back into the game. So, we tweaked it quite a lot and made it easier. And we also added in a fun little feature where… so if you roll X’s, that’s kind of like a bad thing. You don’t want to roll those. But if you roll two or more of them, Jupiter can swipe his paw across and reroll them for you, which is, kind of nice. 

GC: It’s a delightful surprise. Is the first time it happened. Yeah. Just reached in to help me out. 

Rob: Yeah. 

John: It’s for us like that… the mini game like the game, we call it the game over minigame internally. And it’s basically… it’s needed in the game to stop people just trying every item on the shelf systematically and brute forcing every puzzle. We want people to actually try and work out the right item. So, we have to have something that takes people out so there’s an incentive to try and get the right item first time round. And obviously, if you’re playing the game correctly, you should never see the game over mini game. You should be able to go through the whole game without seeing it. But it’s there like as… and it’s got to fit sort of thematically like does it does it work like does it work within this world? It’s got to be kind of simple to play. And then we also wanted to try and make it so that if you are coming back to it regularly like you can kind of learn how to play it and then we try and increase the difficulty a little bit as you go along. So it becomes almost like a game in itself which you can kind of have… have and there is some sort of strategy to it. So yeah, I think whether people like it or not, we… we don’t, it’s going to be hard to judge until it comes out, but it’s… it’s the best we were able to come up with for that yeah, that section of the game. 

GC: Yeah. As you say, to keep people from just brute forcing every puzzle because it takes you out of the experience if you’re just click click click. Okay, well that doesn’t work, that doesn’t work. Okay. No, it… it absolutely had a great effect there as does the hint system. Did you discuss whether you wanted to have a hint system in the game or was that always the plan? 

John: The… the hint system is there again for, like, people who get to a point where they’re really stuck and they’re going to quit the game and never come back to it. And it’s like, you know, why are we trying to punish people if they’re having a hard time? like let’s give them clues and rather than just telling them the answer, let’s try and like give a, you know, a simple clue and then if they’re still struggling another clue and then if they’re still struggling it maybe a final clue that really hints at it. But like it’s about providing as seamless an experience for everyone. And so having the hints, is something we always plan to do in Strange Horticulture and then for this absolutely we would… we definitely added it. And we’ve done another thing this time round which we didn’t do previously which is we kind of we talked a lot about it and then we’ve just decided to do it anyway is when you solve a puzzle and you identify an item in the in the screen that comes up there’s a popup and we we list the reason…

GC: What the clues were. 

John: What the clues were. The idea being that if someone wasn’t entirely sure why that was the right answer, we’ve given them the clues so that they can go, “Ah, okay, that makes sense.” And also maybe get into the way we think and how we’re setting puzzles, 

GC: Teaching them what to look for in future puzzles. 

Rob: Right, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, that was the thinking behind it. Sure. 

GC: Well, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, and that’s what it… that’s the effect it had on me. So, I confirm that works. You say the game is largely not humorous, and I think that’s true, but there are a lot of moments of levity in there, like at the time I clicked, you know, to feel what the texture of a bottle’s label was, and the answer was papery. 

Rob: Right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Sure. 

GC: Is there stuff that from there that, like, really makes you guys laugh? 

Rob: Yeah. So when I said (it) is less humorous, I guess I was meaning in contrast to something like Discworld, which is very silly like super British sarcastic kind of humor. We do… we do have some of that kind of dry humor in there as well. You can probably tell from our accents that we’re British and… and that’s yeah, that’s kind of in our DNA there. So yeah, we did put a few things in. I’m struggling to think of any good examples off the top of my head, but yeah, I think certainly Verona adds that partly that’s why I like Verona Green because she adds a bit of that sort of wit to her um… 

GC: ..in her interactions. 

John: Yeah. when we… when we can be witty, we we’ll try and add some wit in just ‘cause it… it works well with the kind of it’s… it’s about a counterpoint to the dark kind of more sinister stuff going on when you can provide moments of levity and I think they’re important. So…

GC: Okay. All right. Now, you’re you’ve already told me that when you’re designing the quests, ‘cause it’s funny, I wrote out my question and it’s like, what comes first? The character who has a problem solved or the item you want to use, but it seems to me the real organ order you’re doing this is you come up with a puzzle you want to do first and then the other two fold into that. That a fair way of describing it? 

Rob: Yes, pretty much, I’d say. Yeah, I think that’s kind of how we approached it was design as many or… or come up with as many puzzles as we could. Like, yeah, I’ve got kind of pages of notebooks filled of just different ideas for item puzzles and… and then you kind of design an item around that. And then because you can you can kind of like not always, but you can kind of tweak the use case of an item to fit where you need it. But yeah, I mean, honestly, this was a real headache for us because yeah, we… we’ve got a narrative going on there as well. So, anyone who comes into your shop, ‘cause it’s not a narrative where you’re kind of necessarily driving it yourself by going out into the world and speaking to different characters, that sort of stuff. It’s more that you… you’re kind of yeah, you’re in your shop and characters come to you and they might propel the narrative forward with a little snippet of dialogue here and there. But then those characters that come in, they… they have to come in for a reason generally. You know, sometimes the character will come in, you know, where we just could not think of an item that this person would need at that point and they just go away and there was no real purpose to their visit other than they wanted to come in and talk to you. But that’s… there’s not too many of those. So yeah, trying to come up with a reason for every single visit and fitting in those use cases for each item. Yeah, real real headache for us and took us quite a long time to kind of unravel that.

GC: Now, for… from a replayability standpoint, at the end of the game, I won’t spoil what happens, but you let us know what happened to all of the characters. How many different character end states did you end up putting in the game? 

Rob: That’s a good question. I… I don’t actually know off the top of my head. Yeah. So, there are… I was going to say there are 10 character characters who kind of have a more central role in the story and that you… give you have bios of them. I think it’s 10. And then there are a couple more who don’t have bios, but they do show up in that endgame summary because they, you know, got intertwined in the story somehow and… and you might want to find out how they turned out. So yeah each of those has you know at least two or three different end states but some of them have quite a few. 

John: Yeah, obviously like you know feeding into that the game has branching points where you have to make choices. And like a character will come in and there’ll be… it’ll be a choice of two items that you can give her and obviously then the narrative branches and we sort of go in different directions and I think we’ve got eight possibly eight eight endings maybe nine endings in the game. And you know, each one has different end states for each of the characters, but it’s based off the end. I think there can only ever be nine separate endings like each one with that kind of summary sheet. 

GC: Okay.

John:  Where some people might…

Rob: No, the summary sheet will be different. 

John: Oh, really? 

Rob: (For like ) the same ending. Yeah. Because there are, you know, there are some characters that…  minor characters that you might have made a different choice with. 

GC: So that doesn’t meaningfully affect the main ending. 

Rob: Right, yeah. 

GC: Okay. Wow. So there’s the nine big endings and then that can have an assortment of character outcomes within the big ending. 

Rob: Right, exactly. 

GC: That is a huge amount of branching. 

Rob: Yeah. Yeah. It’s not… it’s slightly less complicated than it sounds perhaps in terms of the branching. It’s you know there yeah there are certain decision points during the game as John says and again like you know that branch branching it is really really difficult again because you don’t want to run into a scenario where you know you you might need an item on one branch and you whatever like it it yeah it’s complicated fitting it into this sort of framework but we obviously We we kind of learned how to do that from Strange Horticulture to a degree and kind of..

John: Yeah. But you make it sound like that we learned and it made it easier but it’s a tool like I think arguably it was harder this time round. Again I… I don’t know why but it was.

GC: All right. Now this is just a detail that I absolutely loved and I got to know how it ended up in the game. If I look left and right in the shop, it’s not like I’m turning my eyes. It’s like I’m picking up the whole shop and moving it because all of the hanging items swing back and forth. Why is that in the game? 

Rob: I kind of… I almost don’t want to admit this because well, no, obviously I will, but it was… it was basically an accident. I didn’t intend for it to be like that. I put the code for pendulums swinging into the game and I noticed that it was doing this and it was only afterwards and and but I, you know, I saw it and I was like, well, it shouldn’t technically be doing that, but it does look kind of cool, so I think I’m just going to leave it in. And yeah, the reason is that instead of ‘cause… so I can either move the camera right in the back end, I can move the camera around the shot or I can move the shelves. But because when you go down to the desk, that’s… that moves the camera down. But then moving the shelves is like a separate thing. I don’t want to move the camera across when I’m on the desk view. So, the easy solution there is to simply move the shelves, which means that by a happy accident, I’m moving the whole world, which means that the pendulums start swaying just because they… their position moves in the world. 

John: But it creates this kind of like extra tactile quality to everything, you know, like just having things like moving and stuff and like there’s something about Strange Horticulture. We had the plants were all swaying and stuff, but these are static items. It’s like how can we create life? And one of the… the things I think that does that is just having the… the talisman, the pendants kind of just sway when you pick them up and put them down and when you move the shop around. And I just yeah, it feels… I don’t know. It feels more enjoyable as a player when you’re kind of navigating it around. Even though maybe it doesn’t entirely make sense. Though that said, we’ve always maintained like the shop itself is an… is a thing is almost like an entity. I mean, there are some puzzles which require I mean, it’s not a spoiler to say there are some plinths in the counter and that one of the puzzles involves putting items on plinths and then you can go to other locations in your shop and the way we do that is we slam the shelves together and you mysteriously get to a different bit. I mean, so it’s… there is a kind of like, I don’t know, magical quality to the way the shop sort of moves around. 

GC: Well, according to the lore, the town was built around the shop, so that’s not a huge surprise. 

Rob: Yeah. Yeah. And nobody really knows who built it or how old it is. 

GC:There you go. Actually, when you’re talking about moving up and down to your… the desk you look down at, I did notice that the controls are much more, kind of, intuitive and user friendly than they were in Strange Horticulture. Like the way you… you put the… the magnifying glass on the mouse wheel this time. So, it’s very easy to just zip into that. The ambidextrous controls in the keyboard. Was that based on feedback from people who played Strange Horticulture? 

Rob: I mean partly that just came out of extending the layout. ‘Cause obviously Strange Horticulture is just that single screen. But this time we wanted to put the characters front and center and have the dialogue text a little bit bigger so it’s, you know, not quite as hard to read on smaller devices. so then you know as an extension of that then the desk goes below the main shop window so now you have to move it around. But then yeah so it kind of came out of that, and yeah obviously there… there was some feedback on Strange Horticulture that we had tried to address as well. And some feedback from people playing the demo of Strange Antiquities that we’ve already been able to address. You know stuff like people struggled with exiting various menus. They wanted to press escape, which I always thought that the default for escape would be to bring up the you know the system menu. But we’ve made it so that that will also exit menus and then it will only bring up the system menu if you’re kind of if you’re not in one of those…

GC: And you’re… you’re in the neutral screen. Okay. 

Rob: Yeah, yeah. 

GC: Yeah. I did hit escape a lot. You’re right. Yeah. 

Rob: Yeah. Well, yeah. Players… players wanted it. So, yeah. So obviously having as much play testing as possible allows, you know, enables us to find those kind of points of friction and… and allows us to smooth them out as much as we can. You know, we’re not going to be able to get everything, but we do the best we can. 

GC: Okay. What kind of work went into designing the game’s maps? Like you talked about some of the inspirations with Consulting Detective, but what I was intrigued by was that all three of the maps you’ve chosen to do in completely different art styles. 

John: Yeah, I mean, well, I mean, it’s funny you say that. I never intended them to be different art styles, but I suppose, like, they’re designed by different map designers. What we… the key thing was we wanted each map to feel different to the last one, right? And… and that extends back to Strange Horticulture as well. We… When we designed that map, you know, when you’re going out looking for flowers, it always felt like it needed to be a wide area. And we set our game in the Lake District in the UK and you go up The Fells and you find rare plants and you bring them back to your shop. And it was all done on a grid- based layout and the puzzles were all all around this kind of grid system. We kind of were like, well, we’ve done that grid layout. We did as many grid kind of based puzzles as we could think of in that game. And we were like, we don’t want to do that again. So what can we do differently? And I mean early on we were like well we’ll just set this in Undermere itself like focus it makes more sense. And (I) really like the idea of doing a street layout map for that. And then we kind of like people loved exploring the maps. Let’s add more. What else can we do? And it was just about trying to find other ideas which would offer us the ability to do different kinds of puzzles. So yeah, again like we don’t want to entirely spoil it for people because I think part of what’s fun playing the game is coming across the different maps as you go through the game and like oh what’s this one got in it and it’s like cool. 

GC: Well, there is definitely a… a spoilery question I would like to ask you about the… the underground map, but I’m definitely not going to do it here. 

Rob: Okay. Sure. 

GC: It was a… it was such a delight to come on that third map and just doing everyone has its own completely different kind of puzzle because for the… the town map it kind of makes sense. You’re asking people who lives across from where? What are the streets named, right? What is north, south, east, and west of place? But then the… for the mansion, right, you’re suddenly asking yourself, okay, now I’m imagining myself walking through this space. Whereas when you get into the underground, it’s all about lore and history. And it’s because it’s interesting because it’s not just three different locations, it’s three different kinds of puzzles. 

John: Yeah. Yeah. And then on top of it, there’s another puzzle, which is when you get a clue card, we don’t tell you which map it is, so you have to kind of analyze it and work out which one we’re talking about. 

GC: Yeah, that was a lot of fun, not going to lie, getting through all the clue cards. Well, the embarrassing part is, you know, you get the first clue card before you know, you get it right away and you’re like, what the… what does this mean? Is this a story thing? What is going on? 

Rob: Yeah. 

GC: It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out it was a map reference. 

Rob: That’s that’s interesting. Yeah. 

GC:Yeah. 

Rob: Obviously, yeah. Well, that’s again that’s part of the game and that’s part of, you know, it’s that coming back to that Ron Gilbert quote of we don’t want to tell people that, we… we don’t want to signpost it. We want players to have those ah kind of moments and and work it out for themselves. 

GC: Oh, and all right, here’s… here’s a kind of related question just for the player experience. Have you considered adding in a new game plus mode where after they’ve gotten the trophy for unlocking every single item when they restart the game, they can just have everything pre-labeled so they can speedrun getting the different endings they want? 

Rob: So yes, we have considered it. I mean, if it’s just a case of pre-labeled, uh, that’s certainly a lot easier. The part of the reason that we haven’t done that yet, as in, so that feature doesn’t exist yet, is because there’s just two of us and making a game and finishing a game is a lot of work. And that is obviously like there’s… for the big fan for the you know our core fans of the game. We want to be able to give them those sorts of features but it’s not necessarily a core feature for the game. So they’re kind of like really nice to haves but yeah we’re not going to prioritize it until we’ve kind of done everything else basically. So yes, we… we would like to add those sorts of features but they’re not there yet. 

John: There… I would also like (to) point out for anyone playing that is interested in trying to find the different endings, it doesn’t require you to always restart the game from the beginning. We… in the save system, we do have save points at every day. So you can kind of go back in to a maybe where if you make a note of where a branch was or like certainly at the end like when you get to the end of the game there’s kind of a choice to make on where you go to kind of do your ending. Like there’s like different places where ending points can happen. So you can kind of try out the… those different branches by just going back a day and trying them different. You don’t have to play the whole game through again. It’s just like some of the more… 

Rob: If you have… if you have, you know, set up the choices to be able to unlock that ending at all, but yes.

John: That’s true. Yeah, I forget that… there are other bits further back like that can have an impact on where you can go at the end. And…

GC: I definitely did not have a choice of where to go at the end. So, obviously, I screwed something up. Okay. Do you guys have a third installment in the series in mind? Can fans expect to be like running a strange pet shop or a strange bakery in 2028? 

Rob: We, I mean, we… Yeah, we’re not committing to anything at this point, but I don’t want to think that we’re done with Strange or we’re done with Undermere in particular. So, yeah, we… we hope to come back to it, but we’re yeah, we’re… we’re you know, we’re we’re toying with ideas behind the scenes definitely. 

John: At the same time, we’ve been working in… on the strange universe now for five years and part of us is kind of like exhausted with it and needs to kind of maybe park it for a bit. So whether we go straight into, like, thinking about that or whether we sort of pivot for a bit, I don’t know. It’s like this is, you know, we’ve been so focused on finishing Strange Antiquities, getting it out, making the best game we could make. That kind of those conversations about what we do for a third game like we have like had them like little ones from time to time but nothing like properly serious like we are definitely going to do that next you know so it’s like we we we do obviously really hope and especially like well it depends kind of like how people see perceive Strange Antiquities when it comes out if people are loving it and want more and there’s a real appetite for it. It kind of makes us feel like…like well we… we ought to, you know, but if it’s really disappointing, well, may… maybe we’ve had enough. 

GC: Well, you’ve been living in this world for 5 years, So like, roughly how much work have you done on the lore and backstory of this world? Like how much do you know about this world that has never been revealed in the games? 

Rob: To be honest, I think most of that does go into the game in some way. The… Yeah, we… Yeah, I think I think it goes into the game. Like there’s… there’s some lore and stuff that we’ve written that doesn’t obviously, but…

John: But those are more like story ideas that we had like that have been dropped. We’re not like the kind of I guess like TV show designers that have planned out series 1 to 5 and they know where it’s going. We… we’ve made series 1, we’ve made series 2, and now the network says, you need to do three more series. Oh, right. Like, yeah, maybe we need to think about it some more. 

GC: You’re building the railroad as you’re going down it. 

John: Yeah, I think I think that’s definitely more of the approach. We, you know, like, I love the idea of sort of Undermere adjacent stories and, like, and things like that… that you know, writing some stories about the world like that kind of go into the history a bit more and stuff like that. That’ll be really cool to do. 

Rob: One certainly one thing that we have really enjoyed this time round is because it’s a sequel, we can kind of reference back to Strange Horticulture. So there’s quite a few little references dotted back to that game in this one. so you know for fans of the first game, I think you’ll spot a few of those things. Um…

GC: it was nice to be able to go to Strange Horticulture in the (game) 

Rob: Yes. Well, exactly. So that’s… that’s one of one of the little Easter eggs. You can actually visit the shop in this one. And there’s yeah, there’s quite a few little things like that and some like… Yeah, I really enjoyed putting those extra lore elements in there that tie back into the first game and kind of some of them might answer some questions. Like I think one of my favorite ones, I guess I don’t want to spoil it too much, but it’s not a big spoiler. There is the great oak in Strange Horticulture, which is never really explained. It’s just something that’s marked on your map. It’s this huge oak tree. And if you are paying attention in this game, you know, there are some small clues about where that came from. Which, you know, it’s… it’s a minor detail, but we really enjoyed peppering those sorts of things in. 

GC: Yeah, lots of mysterious items with oak handles in the game. 

Rob: Right? 

GC: Definitely tying in if you were go through the book carefully. All right, Sophie’s choice time. You have to pick one cat. Hellebore or Jupiter. 

Rob: Oh gosh, what are you doing to us? It’s… I think it’s Jupiter for me. I think…

John: Oh, you see, I would…

Rob: I’m sorry. (I’m sorry Hellebore)

John: I mean, Jupiter now, like it’s hard to I do love Jupiter with his heterachromia and, obviously my he looks quite… a substantially better visually. My art stuff has improved and things, but I do still really have a soft spot for Hellebore. Especially ‘cause he was such, like, a last minute addition to Strange Horticulture. He’s he was not, you know, there from the start. It was like when we were we basically had the game mostly there like in terms of you know…

GC:  All the mechanics, all the content? 

JOhn: All the mechanics and all the not all the content but like certainly all the mechanics and then we were like something’s missing like what is it? And it’s like, yeah, a cat obviously like that. It’s got to have a cat. Like… And then we like, well, can it just be a cat that just didn’t… it doesn’t really have anything to do with the game, but it’s just there. Yeah, why not? Like, just throw it in. And like, it just… it was such a… a winning addition. I  genuinely believe that Strange Horticulture would not have seen the success it has if Hellebore had not been a part of it. 

Rob: Yeah, it’s… it’s kind of shocking how long it took us to realize that this game needed a cat.

GC: Well, I’m glad you did because that purr and that petting is… is always a pleasure to do. 

Rob: Yeah. 

John: Yeah. 

GC: And of course, Jupiter has a bigger role, which I won’t spoil in this game, than Hellebore had in that one. Big question though, the game is coming out. What is the most important thing that you want people to know about the game? Like what is the thing like this is what makes this special to us and this is why we are desperate to share it with you. What are you most excited for people to see?

Rob: That is… that is an incredibly difficult question to answer. I think just the love that we have poured into this over, you know, three years of hard work. And yeah, I think, you know, I just I hope it comes through in all the little details that we’ve put into the game. 

John: Yeah. I mean, we’re just incredibly excited to share it now with people. It gets to a point where you start like you… you’re really proud of your work and then the more you work on it, it starts to, like, go the other way and you kind of want to kick it into the sun at times. And now I I’m just I really wanted to get it to people to show like one the progression like that we’ve made ‘cause I think whilst you know I look back at Strange Horticulture I think we made a pretty good game and obviously you know from people’s perception of it like it clearly resonated with a lot of people but I think we have just taken that and you really improved it on almost in every aspect. Well, at least from my point of view. Like visually, it’s a step up. Like in terms of like the puzzles and the way those (are) done, it’s a step up. Like I just so I just hope people see that as well and enjoy and enjoy it as much as Strange Horticulture and hopefully more. 

GC: Okay. Well, thank you so much for doing this. I’ve learned a lot about the game and as someone who just finished it, I can confirm that it is very much just… Everything you loved about Strange Horticulture has just been moved a leap forward in design this time around. Everything…

Rob: (That’s) very very kind of you to say so. Thank you so much.

GC: Of course!

John: Yeah, that obviously that is what we were hoping for but it’s… it’s lovely to hear honestly. 

GC: No, but I mean the design it’s… it’s so much more playable and so much more in-depth without losing any of the charm. That’s the thing. It really feels like an extension of the world. Yeah. While all of the gameplay mechanics have just taken an amazing leap forward. So, congratulations on how it turned out. 

Rob: Thank you so much. 

GC: Okay. and of course, when is the game releasing and what can people play it on? 

Rob: It’s out on September 17th. And it’s coming to Steam and Switch first, and hopefully other platforms later. 

GC: Okay. Thank you so much for your time and I encourage everybody if they haven’t yet, check out the demo immediately. You don’t have the exploration gameplay, but you do have everything, all the other main parts of the game. 

Rob: Uh, yeah. Well, the exploration is there as well. You just, you know, you have to find that map first, but it’s there. 

GC: Oh, it is. Oh my god. You’re kidding me. 

Rob: No, it’s there. 

GC: I thought it wasn’t there. Oh my god. 

Rob: That but that’s again. Yeah, some people don’t find it. Some people do. 

GC: Apparently, I’m also bad at the demo. Oh, thanks so much. Thanks for watching. Be sure to check out the links for more accessible reviews, interviews, and features at Gamecritics. Also, like the video and subscribe so you get notified whenever new content drops. We’ll see you back here for more. But until then, au revoir!

The post VIDEO INTERVIEW: Bad Viking on Strange Antiquities appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH It’s a Zachlike by Zach. Wonderful theming.

LOW Might be too easy for the hardcore Zachheads

WTF Pachinko+Solitaire (but it rules)

If pressed to name the game designer I admire most, I’d probably say Zach Barth. Not because I enjoy his games the most (although I enjoy them a great deal) but because the Zachtronics oeuvre — beginning with SpaceChem with 2011, and concluding in 2022 with Last Call BBS — is probably the most consistent, artistically coherent body of work in the field.

Big claim, but it’s true. The Zachtronics titles are the result of intense focus — of a team working entirely within their own self-discovered ludological world, cultivating a hitherto-unexplored corner of puzzle design so sui generis that we came up with a new name for them — Zachlikes. Every Zachtronics release (excluding a couple outliers) built off a core concept of open-ended, discovery-based automation and/or programming puzzles, in which players uncover their own unique solutions to each problem at a pace that, too, belongs to each player personally. Every Zachlike borrows pieces and parts from the prior ones, but adds something of its own, pilfered in its turn by the next one.

After Last Call, Zachtronics disbanded — or rather metamorphosed into Coincidence, a company that’s the kind of outfit someone starts when they’ve made enough money to liberate themselves from the capitalist mill-wheel and can do whatever the hell they want. Coincidence released a couple of card games, an educational title to teach arithmetic, and even something called “Zach Attack!,” a scratch card-based logic affair. But sadly, nothing that could be called a Zachlike — until now.

Kaizen: A Factory Story is not just something made by Zach Barth, but is a genuine Zachlike in the classical tradition. Not the most adventurous one, nor the longest, certainly not the hardest, but Barth and his crew are fully and gloriously back on their bullshit here, right down to the requisite solitaire game-within-a-game.

Kaizen takes place in Japan in the late ’80s, when the country was riding an economic boom that resulted, amongst other things, in virtuosic consumer electronics manufacturing. As David Sugimoto, a young business graduate from Indiana who goes to Japan for a sales job but ends up shepherding production factories instead, players create assembly lines for appliances, computers, video game systems, and more — it’s a comforting, nostalgia-laced parade celebrating the most appealing of era of product design before later variants of the corporate psychosis leached all character and quality from consumer goods. (Do we really think anyone is going to look back fondly on the way the PS5 looks, for example?)

The Zachtronics games don’t get enough credit for their atmospherics. Story and setting are peripheral, but realized with great taste and an eye for the historical (or fantastical) milieu being evoked. ’80s Japan is a low-hanging fruit in terms of aesthetic, but Kaizen pleases from top to bottom in this regard. The sonic landscape is a boppable city pop homage, the color palette and clean linework lifted straight from Nagai Hiroshi, and in the puzzles themselves, non-copyright-infringing homages to landmark electronics and appliances are rendered with an almost touching accuracy, down to the particular density of computer polymers, or the brushed metal of a camcorder square chassis. Even the degree to which the little red Power LEDs are recessed into the frames seems wholly convincing and accurate. This is the least abstracted, the most tangible, Zachlike puzzle pieces have ever been.

Each puzzle is a work assignment — assemble a rice cooker, a computer, or a bidet. Starting with separate, sometimes unfinished components, players have to utilize different apparatuses to modify and manipulate these pieces into a finished product. Mechanical arms push, flip, and grab components; electric saws remove material; welders and riveters fuse disparate elements together. All of these mechanisms are assigned behaviors on a timeline at the bottom of the worktable.

The challenge comes from the physicality of all of these pieces. An arm can’t be in the way of another arm, the saws will cut whatever passes through them indiscriminately, etc. As the Zachlike-likers know, much of the frisson comes from solving these micro-problems to reach a viable solution. After that, any solution can be tweaked to optimize for the three different metrics — time, cost, and size — and every solution is ranked on and compared to other players’ solutions with the signature Zachtronics histograms.

This is the proven, beloved Zachlike format, and it works just as well in Kaizen as before. All this being said, there is something every so slightly insubstantial about this particular entry.

It might be the first Zachlite, much easier and shorter than installments in the established Zachtronics canon. The Zachlikes are always joyful pain to me, as there is not a single neuron in brain with any sort of engineering bent, and I usually crawl through these games at a sub-testudinal pace — but I blazed through Kaizen. Sometimes I solved a puzzle in less than five minutes. Once, I noticed that another player had come up with more or less the exact same solution that I did — something that has never happened to me with prior Zachlikes. The difficulty does ramp up, but even later on there’s this nebulous feeling of limitation — almost as if the devs were holding back.

I feel safe saying it’s intentional — in other words, not a symptom of fatigue or disinterest on the dev’s part, but rather a purposefully lighter take on the core Zachlike themes. It’s an approach I understand, even if I personally don’t endorse it. I may not be good at Opus Magnum or Infinifactory, but their bracing, permissive difficulty is part of what I love about them, and the relative lack of challenge in Kaizen gives it less mechanical character than its older siblings, and, I would guess, less staying power in the long run. If those prior games are vast, rich, brain-pain buffets, Kaizen is a light, spritzy cerebrum sorbet.

Does that mean that I would recommend Kaizen to the Zach-curious out there? Yes and no. It’s a delightful experience, but I think newcomers would actually be better served doing what I did and jumping in at the deep end with one of Kaizen’s classic predecessors. Kaizen is best, I think, for the already-converted. It’s not on the same level as the older titles, but it’s a delightful dose of most of what made them special. A summer treat for the sickos.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Coincidence and published by Astra Logical. It is available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher. Approximately 12 hours of play were devoted to the game, and it was not completed (I got hung up on the excellent Pachi-Sol solitaire minigame for while). There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game is not rated by the ESRB. There’s nothing troubling, dark, unpleasant, or violent in this game whatsoever. The vast majority of time is spent looking at a table of components and mechanisms, and the closest the game comes to toilet humor is in having players assemble a bidet.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes present.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: Dialogue for the dozen or so cutscenes are accompanied by subtitles, but the subtitles cannot be resized.

Remappable Controls: The game is keyboard and/or mouse only. The controls are not remappable. Everything can be done with the mouse alone, but there are intuitive hotkeys (CTRL+Z for undo, etc.) for faster solution editing.

The post Kaizen: A Factory Story Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The blunderbuss!

LOW The second act.

WTF Who knew a 17^th century shotgun could be such a versatile tool?

I came to Sacre Bleu with little foreknowledge of musketeers.  Having now spent several swashbuckling hours beneath one of their plumed hats, I can safely say I have overlooked the deadliest fighting force in human history.  From standard swords and pistols to the more esoteric blunderbuss that doubles as a rocket propulsion system, the destructive capacity of these frisky Frenchmen cannot be overstated.  Dubious historical accuracy aside, Sacre Bleu is an excellent demonstration of the alchemical potential between flexible mechanics and (mostly) tight design.

Ostensibly a 2D action-platformer, Sacre Bleu tasks players with battling through castles, kitchens and sewers to escape the clutches of a corrupt Cardinal and his army of mercenaries.  However, the cartoony, side-scrolling trappings hide Sacre Bleu’s more tactical nature. 

Due in large part to its heavy reliance on slow motion, combat in Sacre Bleu has a unique flow.  Any time players aim one of their weapons, the action slows down, allowing ample time to plan an assault.  Building on this foundation is the blunderbuss.  Though counterintuitive, this rifle does not deal direct damage.  Instead, firing blasts of air that can launch the player skyward and move objects, this weapon becomes a tool to set up elaborate attacks with the more bespoke weapons, such as the pistol and grenades.

There is a staccato rhythm to these fights.  Snapping in and out of slow motion, bursts from the blunderbuss propel the musketeer across the battlefield lining up headshots, deflecting arrows and lobbing grenades along the way.  Measured consideration and chaotic heroism form an exhilarating union as moments of careful planning are punctuated by explosions and corpses.

Sacre Bleu reinforces this cadence in its platforming.  Many of the stages are made up of spike-filled mazes requiring quick, mid-air turns, and it is here that the blunderbuss truly takes center stage.  Whether it’s launching me up to hard-to-reach ledges, providing a quick boost to outrun spinning blades, or simply knocking obstacles out of the way, I felt as though I was constantly finding new uses for it.  With up to three bursts before touching down, freezing time mid-air to adjust the musketeer’s trajectory is a breeze.  While intimidating in appearance, even the most complex sequences rely more on keen observation and planning than pinpoint precision.

Unfortunately, these stellar mechanics are let down by Sacre Bleu’s inconsistent camera. The perspective was often either too close or too far away. It just never seemed to be where I wanted, and I found it difficult to track my character during some of the trickier platforming segments. There were also times when my character outpaced the camera, and I’d sprint headlong into a wall of spikes I couldn’t yet see.

Compounding these issues is Sacre Bleu’s underbaked middle third.  With a greater emphasis on puzzles, many of these sections require the player to stand in specific spots while using the blunderbuss to manipulate the environment.  While a nice change of pace, these segments can be overly fiddly.  Though not a deal breaker, knowing exactly what I needed to do, but being unable to execute because my character isn’t in quite the right spot is never a great feeling.

Ultimately, what I admire most about Sacre Bleu is its focus.  The developers came up with a novel core mechanic in the blunderbuss and explored its full potential.  While not every element is executed to perfection, there is nothing wasted, and Sacre Bleu never overstays its welcome.  With a little tighter fit and finish, Sacre Bleu would be unimpeachable, instead it will have to settle for just being pretty darned good.

Rating: 7.5 out of 10

Buy Sacre Bleu – PC – Switch

Disclosures: This game is developed by Hildring Studio Inc and published by Noodlecake Studios.It is currently available on PC and Switch. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the Switch. Approximately 6 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated T and contains Blood, Crude Humor, and Violence.  While this game contains pervasive violence, it’s presented in cartoony, unrealistic fashion.  Additionally, the camera is generally pulled far enough back that the action appears small on the screen. Enemies can be killed with pistols, swords, grenades and arrows. There is a small amount of blood occasionally, and enemies cry out when killed. There is no profanity.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. The subtitles cannot be altered and/or resized. There is no recorded dialogue in this game, and all conversations are represented in on-screen text boxes.  All visual cues are accompanied by on-screen indicators. About half of my playtime was without sound and I did not experience any issues or difficulties. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls.

The post Sacre Bleu Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Stomping the Dungeon boss as the Order.

LOW Basically every time I fought the frustrating Keep boss.

WTF Why is the river such a weak terrain?

Given the opportunity, a random number generator will screw a player over. Games that lean heavily on randomization, such as roguelikes, fundamentally must balance the inevitable frustration of busted runs with a compelling experience of play. Many games meet that standard, but unfortunately Drop Duchy falls just short.

Like most roguelikes, Drop Duchy is built around performing repeated runs — in this case through a lightly-randomized series of combat rounds and resource pickups, and three fixed bosses. The setup for combat will be instantly familiar to anyone who has played Tetris – tetrominoes appear at the top of a field of play and can be rotated before dropping them to the bottom to build complete rows.

The tiles consist of various kinds of terrain and the buildings that interact with them. For instance, a Farm transforms surrounding Plains tiles into Fields, giving a bonus to a Watchtower that gains more units from the latter terrain type. As enemy buildings drop too, arranging tetrominoes so that the terrain benefits the player and not the enemy is a key strategic goal.

In Drop Duchy, completing a row harvests the resources of the terrain (such as grain coming from Fields or Plains) rather than making it disappear. An empty tile prevents harvest, and there’s no way to “uncover” a mistake. Once the tiles reach the top of the play area, the round ends and the player can send military units from his buildings to take on those in enemy buildings (with a classic rock-paper-scissors vulnerability system). The reward for victory is a selection of new buildings or technologies that give passive boosts.

The individual rounds can vary greatly depending on the array of terrain available, but are generally unlikely to end a run and feel too relaxed. The bosses have unusually-shaped fields of play and mostly depend on penalizing the player for putting tiles in forbidden zones. I enjoyed two of the bosses, but I felt that the second boss was poorly tuned, with too much excluded space and penalties that were too stiff for violating it. Many of my runs ended there.

That nonetheless meant that most of my runs exceeded 30 minutes – almost as long as the longest game of Tetris ever played. It’s to its considerable advantage that most games of Tetris are considerably shorter than that: the low stakes make it easier to laugh off the brutal unfairness of the RNG. The time investment of a failed run of Drop Duchy makes it feel inordinately bad to receive, say, an unlucky run of S, Z, and O-shaped tetrominoes in a boss level.

The salve for a failed run is intended to be advancement along Drop Duchy’s progression tree, which is unlocked by fulfilling its many Challenges, which range from gathering certain amounts of a resource to performing particular tricks with certain buildings.

Unfortunately, unlocking new elements didn’t always feel like progress. Gaining the river terrain complicates the earlier parts of the run with few benefits. Most cards interacting with this terrain are not strong and are entirely ineffective if there are less than 15 contiguous river tiles, making them high-risk, mid-reward selections.

New mechanics like Faith have few benefits until the player puts large numbers of the associated buildings into his limited set of tiles. If they don’t turn up, the result is a busted run. Outside of runs with their associated faction, these tiles mostly feel like they’re taking up space.

Even the sheer number of new buildings and techs gets in the way, pushing the encounter frequency of the most useful buildings down significantly. As I got further and further along the progression tree, busted runs where I simply never got offered useful military buildings became too common. When I did get a strategy going, I often found myself in a trap where I couldn’t get the additional buildings I needed to strengthen it. This became another reason to dislike the river — after a while I simply stopped regularly pulling buildings that could make use of it at all.

The unlockable factions are a mixed bag as well. From the start, one can choose the Duchy faction, which relies on small, agrarian buildings that accrue resources easily and are easy to place in the boss fights. The late-unlocking Order synergizes neatly with the otherwise-troubled Faith system and also features a number of interesting upgrade and harvest abilities.

The Republic faction, on the other hand, relies heavily on large buildings and on transforming terrain into “town”, making it unusable for many other buildings. This faction was especially difficult to use against the second boss.

Sometimes a roguelike can pull a player back in with aesthetic components, but Drop Duchy doesn’t really offer anything compelling. The terrain is largely dull, though at least the mountain tiles vary entertainingly. The buildings are nicely drawn but not especially memorable and they don’t do anything interesting like change based on faction or upgrade level. The music is fine, but there’s just not enough character in the graphical design to make that next run feel necessary, and no story to speak of.

Drop Duchy attempts to ease the hard feelings of a busted run with its progression-unlocking Challenges, but the proliferation of new features feels like it dilutes rather than strengthens subsequent runs. As a consequence, Drop Duchy falls too far into the frustrating regime of RNG-dominated games. There’s an interesting concept here, but Drop Duchy lacks the kind of snappy gameplay or compelling aesthetic that would sustain it through the unfairness of waiting in vain for that dang line piece that just won’t drop.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Buy Drop Duchy – PC

Disclosures: This game is developed by Sleepy Mill Studio and published by The Arcade Crew. It is currently available on PC via Steam. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on a home-built Windows 11 PC equipped with a Ryzen 7 processor, 64 GB RAM, and a single GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics card (with various 576.x drivers). Approximately 20 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was not completed (all factions and game modes were played and ~80% of the progression tree was unlocked). There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: As of press time this game has not been rated by the ESRB. Beyond simply acknowledging the existence of armed conflict and religious heresy, there’s nothing here to object to.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game has no dialogue nor are there any significant sound cues. Therefore, it is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls.

The post Drop Duchy Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH All-time ’90s internet vibes.

LOW Some of the platforming sections weren’t super responsive.

WTF Is it possible to feel nostalgia for something I wasn’t even alive for?

As someone who was born just before 2000, I never got to experience the earlier, jankier versions of the Internet. It often made me wonder how people came to love something so antiquated compared to what we have now.

It’s that janky charm that MainFrames, a new 2D platformer from developer Assoupi, tries to capture in its adventure. The title is an entertaining dive into the past, and it executes on those ’90s themes in every possible way.

Playing as the astutely-named Floppy (yes, he’s a disk) I spent the journey finding this mascot’s function in a complex computer. See, Floppy, despite how cute they are, is a daemon, which back in ’90s computer-speak means an errant program or function not connected to anything particular. In a normal world, this would mean nothing, but in this world, it means that the computer’s security will try to “erase” Floppy without a trace.

As Floppy, my task was to explore the rest of the internal network, rescuing daemons like me. Floppy does this by collecting fellow daemons from the far reaches of the computer and brings them back to the “break room” hub world. These characters are animated into lively and real computer buddies, all trying to save themselves from eventual “deletion.” Among these misfits, Floppy fits right in.

If MainFrames has nothing else, it possesses an immaculate and refined sense of style. Every aspect of this game is pulled straight out of an old PC running Windows XP. Jumping through each stage in the seven major levels was a challenging-yet-enjoyable way to explore an artistic wonderland visualizing an old computer ecosystem.

These vibes are most obviously expressed in the art style of MainFrames. Many times I’d be trying to assess where I was supposed to go with Floppy and pick which platforms to jump on, and instead I’d just be staring at the brilliantly-constructed backgrounds that backlit each stage. Level after level is decorated with beautiful pixel art that pops. Each level also screened personal anecdotes that the developers left behind in the style of instant messaging apps like AOL. The graphics are stellar, yet look intentionally dated enough that it could be running on an old machine.

While the visuals are on point, the ’90s style came through most clearly in the actual mechanics of each level.

2D platformers have been around for decades, so it takes smart developers to take these tried-and-true mechanics and rework them in engaging ways., and MainFrames does both exceptionally well.

They play the classics, of course — jumping pads, variable gravity, and switchable platforms, and each of these 2D platforming mainstays fits like a glove in each level, and there are visual representations. Sometimes an element might look like a browser window. Sometimes elements disappear, phasing out of reality like a computer glitch. There’s a mouse clicker that allows the player to activate certain windows over others, and certain windows can expand depending on the direction that Floppy is running.

All of these things and how they present on screen allowed for some pretty wild experimentation that often made me feel like I was beating MainFrames at its own game, and the best levels in MainFrames come when these elements are combined. Since each mechanic is integrated well in the overall ecosystem of each level, remixing them together feels organic.

Though MainFrames is marketed as a “cozy” platformer, these levels are not cakewalks. A few throw together a ton of different mechanics at the player in quick succession, and it can feel overwhelming at times. There were certain levels that took me multiple tries to beat.

Despite the challenge of certain sections, I only spent around 3.5 hours playing MainFrames, and the relatively quick respawn time didn’t feel like the levels were punishing me for trying them over and over again. The few issues that I did have were that sometimes it felt like the placement of a platform or jump pad was slightly off from a normal player’s jump trajectory, but these errors were few and far between.

MainFrames is a delightful romp set in an era of technology that took place before my time, but thanks to its charm and solid gameplay, I felt nostalgic for that world despite having never lived in it.

Rating: 7.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Assoupi and published by The Arcade Crew. It is currently available on PC and Switch. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and was reviewed on PC. Approximately 3.5 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game is not yet rated on the ESRB, but this game contains fantasy “violence.” It consists of certain “digital friends” being “deleted” from the game, but there is no explicit death or violence depicted.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Dear & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There is no dialogue in this game, and the only “story” bits are told through pop-up text on the screen. there are no necessary audio cues. The game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: The game’s controls are fully remappable.

The post Mainframes Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Cute aesthetic. Intuitive, brain-soothing gameplay.

LOW Too chill for its own good.

WTF Some of the marketing is cringe-inducing.

The indie game scene is — and I don’t think this is a controversial thing to say — the healthiest, most interesting and fecund sector of the industry. With the major game studios intent on treading mechanical water and out-glossing one another, anybody craving texture, creativity, innovation, spark, or juice should turn to the individual artists and small collectives for the good stuff. Nearly everything I’ve truly loved from the last five years – at least – has been an indie release.

Indie devs are the freak specialists, the alchemists, the daring vivisectionists fusing together disparate elements with an experimental flamboyance that the big boys lost back in the PlayStation 2 era. The only problem, if we want to call it that, is that there is actually too much good stuff out there, an absolutely tidal glut of noteworthy indie releases. Unshackled from the need for console clearance, indie devs can put their titles online for a (relatively) low cost, potentially finding audience sectors that the megacorps, faceless and vaguely moronic in their glittering arcologies, just aren’t interested in servicing. Thus, the indie scene is an embarrassment of riches and it takes a bit for a title to stand out.

Certainly Darenn Keller, developer of Dawnfolk, managed to bring his game up to a humble yet meaningful level of visibility — mainly through some sorta cute, sorta heavy-handed marketing stuff including an ad on Tumblr (!?!) that playfully references a meme from Supernatural (!?!) and if I write any more about this I will instantly age 1000 years, turn into dust, and my remains will blow away on cosmic winds…

In Dawnfolk, players build and expand a city on a planet imperiled by some sort of supernatural darkness. They’re aided by Lueur, a cute little blossom of flame who looks like something Hayao Miyazaki would doodle on a napkin during a smoke break. Each map is a grid of square tiles, some lit, some dark. Leuer’s job is to light the dark tiles on the frontier, so that players can build structures on them. Every structure affects production in one of four areas – Light, Workforce, Food, and Materials. All four are necessary for a successful city, but players will prioritize some over others depending on their situation.

The central gimmick in Dawnfolk is that many interactions on these tiles entail completing a real-time activity. In order to clear a tile of trees, for example, players play a reflex-based, three-second long woodchopping minigame. I say “central gimmick” but that’s almost overselling it since these minigames are just an embellishment, a little riff that Dawnfolk plays before leaving to explore other elements with its chilled out, near-weightless touch.

Lightness is the operative word with Dawnfolk. It does not ask for epic play sessions. It is not Crusader Kings or Civilization, and any of its maps across its various modes (excluding Endless) can be completed in an hour or less. It took me 60 hours to finish my first playthrough of CKII. I don’t know if I’ve ever finished a game of Civ — has anyone? But I completed Dawnfolk’s entire Story Mode and sampled some of its Puzzle and Curious Expedition maps, in well under ten hours.

This is not a criticism, inherently, as the strategy/civ builder format needs more short stories. I like that a Dawnfolk city’s entire arc resolves in less time than it takes to watch a briskly-paced movie. I also like that each Story scenario adds a twist to the formula, whether it’s the presence of an orc culture on the map, a dragon who demands tribute, or zombie-infested swamps. My particular favorite was a scenario about hunting for treasure in an archipelago (mostly water) which forced creative layouts to maximize production across several little landmasses.

So short is good, being accommodating is good, simplifying is good, but at some point a game that smooths off every rough edge and element that could generate friction, loses mechanical texture. Dawnfolk is too relaxed.

I am not a brilliant strategist, but I didn’t lose a single map in the Dawnfolk campaign – I didn’t even come close. Not a single bead of sweat crossed my brow, not a scintilla of anxiety passed through my system at any point. Even the aforementioned twists on specific maps don’t crinkle the strategy in big ways. Ultimately, every city felt like every other city, with the same buildings more or less doing the same things. It seemed almost impossible to make a real mistake.

…And all of that is fine, in a vacuum. Dawnfolk is pleasant, but nothing here sets off fireworks. Nothing grabs a player by the ganglia and makes them think about Dawnfolk when they aren’t actively playing it. It’s all breadth and no depth, and there isn’t even enough breadth here to make a single strategy sandwich. Play just one map, and the majority of the overall experience has been revealed.

So, while there was not a single moment of Dawnfolk that was unpleasant, buggy, or painful, there are many indie strategy titles I would recommend before it. I despise that we have to look at the experience of art as a transaction (and it grosses me out to say this) but I want people to know that their money may be better spent elsewhere.

…But then again, it may not.

If Dawnfolk looks cool, give it a try. It is a pared down, chill experience sitting at the crossroads between idle game, puzzle game, and city builder. Going in expecting a full-fat example of any one of these is asking to be disappointed. Expecting it to fully explore the territory it stakes out for itself is also a mistake. But for those who can relax and reign in their expectations, there’s an honest joy to be had.

Rating: 6.5 out of 10

— Ben Schwartz

Buy Dawnfolk: PC

Disclosures: This game is developed by Darenn Keller and published by Astra Logical. It is available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher. Approximately 7 hours of play were devoted to the game, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game is not rated by the ESRB. The game could fairly be described as “wholesome” with all characters and units (even typically unpleasant creatures like zombies) drawn in cute pixel art. There is combat and death is implied, but little violence is depicted on screen. During hunting minigames, players shoot arrows at animals who do fall over and die, but there is no blood. There is no foul language, no mature themes, and nothing that could typically be called “scary.”

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes present.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There is no spoken dialogue in this game, everything is presented with text. The text cannot be resized, although there is an option for an “HD font” which looks a bit bigger. The most important cues are when a turn ticks over and production occurs for all buildings/tiles — there is a “clock sound” to indicate a new turn, but all tiles also have a visual production animation. That being said, they’re pretty low-key and easy to miss. There is also has a turn-based option so the real-time elements can be completely removed, and this is the mode I recommend in general.

Remappable Controls: No, the game’s controls are not remappable. Both keyboard+mouse and controller are supported. Controller is recommended.

The post Dawnfolk Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH An incredible collection of titles with excellent presentation to match. 

LOW Nearly missing school and work deadlines thanks to my Tetris addiction.

WTF I would love to see a collection like this for games like Galaga or Tecmo Bowl. 

Digital Eclipse’s Tetris Forever opens with a quote by videogame designer Henk Rodgers, most famously known for securing the rights to distribute Tetris outside of Russia — “Tetris is the one game that’s still going to be around when all the other games are gone.”

It’s a profound statement that speaks to both Tetris’ impact in the still-relatively-young medium, and the overall quality of the original title itself. For over four decades, everyone from children to grandmothers has likely enjoyed some version of Tetris, and it’s safe to assume that people will still be trying to beat their best score decades from now.

Tetris Forever is a part of Digital Eclipse’s Gold Master Series, accompanied by other docu-games such as Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story and The Making Of Karateka. Part game compilation and part history lesson, it’s full of various Tetris-es released over the years, such as the 1989 port for the Nintendo Entertainment System, all the way up to spinoffs like Hatris.

There are too many to list in full here, but other gems included are Tetris Battle Gaiden, Super Tetris 2 + Bombliss, and a brand-new title called Tetris Time Warp. While some popular entries might not be represented (the most notable omission is the original GameBoy version) there’s still plenty here to make block-droppers happy, and it’s a blessing that there are finally accessible versions of the original Tetris on modern consoles. As much as I love some of the wilder stuff like Puyo Puyo Tetris 2, nothing beats a laid-back, simple and gimmick-free session with a damn-near-perfect game. 

Presentation in Tetris Forever is a knockout, with menus that are easy to navigate and a host of accessibility features for every title in the collection. Each version has a manual, a control scheme that can be customized, and a handy rewind feature. I also loved how everything was unlocked and readily available from the start, allowing players to jump into whatever they wanted at any time.

Tetris Forever also includes an extensive interactive documentary. Chronicling everything from the inception of Tetris to the cataloging of virtually every release, there is an impressive history in this package. Every chapter features interviews from both Henk Rogers and Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov, giving players the context behind each of the iterations in the collection. There’s also a great deal of larger context surrounding historical and political events at the time of each title’s release. As players read and watch different sections of the documentary, they can also easily play the corresponding game featured in that segment. 

Tetris Forever also does something that I appreciate and I don’t often see — it preserves and legitimizes games in a way that movie buffs have done for the film. Similar to how a Criterion Collection Blu-ray is packaged with essays and supplementary features to an important film, Tetris Forever provides amazing substance to a series that deserves every bit of praise. It’s a titan in an industry that does not often respect or remember its past, and one that will continue to be a key talking point in conversations regarding gaming as an art form. 

Overall, Tetris Forever is both for fans of Tetris and also those who deeply care about videogame history. Not only is it collecting an amazing set of entries in a franchise that is both prolific and excellent, but it’s also a much-needed encapsulation that preserves its important legacy. 

 Rating: 9 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is published and developed by Digital Eclipse. It is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, XBO and XBX/S. This copy was obtained via publisher for review and was reviewed on Switch. Approximately 10 hours were spent in single-player modes and the game was not completed. 

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated E for Alcoholic Reference and Mild Language. The games themselves don’t feature any violence or objectionable material, and the documentary portions don’t either. 

Colorblind Modes: Colorblind modes are not present in the options menu.

Deaf and Hard of Hearing Gamers: Players can choose to turn on subtitles for the documentary segments and even resize them. (See example above.) Audio is not necessary during play. This collection is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: The controls can be remapped.

The post Tetris Forever Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Charming art style and characters.

LOW Clunky controls make complicated repairs impossible to complete quickly.

WTF Why do random customers keep deciding to kill me?

With the amount of roguelikes I’ve played this year, I often wonder if developers will ever run out of content to push into procedurally-generated problems.

Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop proves once again that limit is nowhere close to being reached as it dares to ask the question — what if we turned a simple mechanic’s job into a life-or-death scenario?

The player starts out as Wilbur, a fox/human hybrid forced into a job at Uncle Chop’s, a repair center for spaceships of all kinds, as well as being a pit stop for priests, criminals, and everyday people passing through the galaxy. It’s an incredibly detailed hub full of witty characters drawn in a simple, yet expressive 2D style.

However, life at Chop’s isn’t an intergalactic easy street. Wilbur’s life is a life of servitude — the player must fix ships in less than ~8 realtime minutes, with each ship presenting a different problem for players to solve.

This problem-solving is the crux of the moment-to-moment gameplay of Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop. Wake up, solve puzzles to repair ships, earn money, pay Wilbur’s R.E.N.T. payments, or else face bankruptcy and death. Yet every time Wilbur fails, he’s thrust right back into the fray like nothing ever happened, called back from the afterlife by some cruel capitalist god.

Each day in Uncle Chop’s, the boss gives Wilbur a set of tasks to complete for the ships that dock at the repair shop. He start out with simple jobs like refueling a ship’s fuel tanks, adjusting oil levels, and replacing missing parts. The gameplay for each job is hands-on — the player must unscrew every bolt, manually adjust sliders and switches, and replace missing or malfunctioning parts by themselves. It’s fairly forgiving the first few times, but the skill floor soon rises to an entirely new level because once Wilbur starts projects that are outside of the typical refueling and replacing fuel cells, it’s almost impossible to get them done on the first try.

Puzzling work orders like fixing a ship’s virtual reality port, changing a rebreather module by creating breathable gas on a miniature planet, or coddling a ship’s AI companion to make it feel better offer an ever-increasing level of challenge.

Don’t get me wrong, these are interesting puzzles to solve, but it becomes more stressful than enjoyable after a certain point because every task Wilbur is forced to complete requires a deep understanding of how every single ship’s system works.

Thankfully, there’s a manual, but using it is extremely unwieldy, with the player having to read the information and fix the problem on the fly because Wilbur can’t stop doing a job once he’s started, otherwise he’ll lose precious money that could be going towards his rent payments. Even for jobs that I thought I’d memorized, every panel left open or errant part left astray would mean pay docked from my overall compensation.

All of these factors combined mean that every time I was presented with a brand new problem that I was unfamiliar with, I would either spend all of my time trying to figure it out and losing other income opportunities or fail it instantly and be set so far back that I wouldn’t be able to make my next rent payment.

Of course, once I figured out the refueling, oil, and rebreather modules, I’d challenge myself to complete these jobs as fast as possible. It takes a while, but eventually overcame them, but let’s not forget that Uncle Chop‘s also offers a roguelike structure that is incredibly repetitive. I’m aware that roguelikes are repetitive by nature, but Uncle Chop’s is a different beast.

When the player begins a ‘run’ in Uncle Chop’s, most things remains the same — on every second day of a run, a ship crashes into the repair zone, and Wilbur has to begin putting out the fire and changing the oil. Every third day starts with a job that requires the same four modules to fix and takes nearly the whole day to complete. Every fourth day, a meteor shower starts raining debris on the workstation, and so on.

It’s the same exact cycle, over and over and over again. This repetitiveness combined with the time limits, certain missions with finicky controls, and a random chance for customers to hold Wilbur up for money at gunpoint and then kill him if you answer their questions incorrectly (yes, he can get shot by customers!) makes for an incredibly frustrating experience. In the nearly 10 hours I played, I only made it to the first boss once and was flummoxed on how to beat it.

Maybe it’s a slow burn and I need more time with it, but Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is so unrelenting in its first act, it left me hanging my head in defeat. It’s a title with a lot of potential, but ultimately, the punishing, repetitive foundation it sits on isn’t enough for me to support continued playthroughs.

Rating: 6 out of 10

— Jack Dunn

Disclosures: This game is developed by Beard Envy and published by Kasedo Games. It is currently available on PC, Switch, XBX/S, and PS5. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and was reviewed on PC. Approximately 8 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was not completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated M for Blood, Strong Language, and Violence. This is not a game for kids. The NPCs in this game use curse words a fair amount, and those NPCs can also kill the protagonist with guns and blades if a job isn’t completed correctly or their rent payments aren’t made on time, often with lots of blood involved.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Dear & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. They cannot be resized. The game offers full subtitle support, but some puzzles require audio cues, like a reactor puzzle that starts beeping faster and faster the closer it gets to blowing up. This game is not fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls.

The post Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.