Month: June 2020

OOOOOH, the author meant THAT kind of race.

Page 53, Game 17: Anaseidos – An anthropomorphic duck race for 5e by C. A. Berlitz

Well, shit. I totally thought this was a RACE race, as in, which duck shall cross the finish line first?

How does duck-racing work? Is this something PCs can bet on? Or are there, like, detailed and meticulous 5e-based rules for duck racing where the players are all ducks, either as a one-shot or with their regular characters because Wizard Shenanigans(tm)? You’ve been polymorphed into a thoroughbred gnomish racing mallard, and your freedom depends on victory. You’re all arranged in your starting boxes, waiting for the referee to give the signal, and … RELEASE THE QUACKEN!!!

I’ve played sillier shit.

Alas. This is just a fanbrew sourcebook on duck-people.

By which I mean, “People with duck heads in the place of the heads you were probably expecting.” Which was the SECOND big disappointment. How do sentient ducks work in D&D? Do they have their own society? Do they go on adventures against marauding bands of golden retrievers? Are there, like, detailed duck-based equipment lists you can use? Or do you just gear them up like any other PC and not sweat bullshit like “How is Sir Quackums wielding that sword, anyway?”

No, the duck people came here from some other dimension fleeing some unknown foe and got tricked and enslaved by dragons and they’re still pretty salty about the whole thing. That’s the gist of it. All very straightforward, no wacky waterfowl jokes or anything.

Hard to read this little sourcebook without feeling like it represents one hell of a wasted opportunity, one way or the other.

But, hey, if your current campaign has you all “This world needs a race of hard-core libertarians who just happen to have duck heads where you expect regular heads to be,” here you go.

Up next: Page 5, Game 29: Master Spy by TURBOGUN

“Throw on your invisibility cloak and put your reflexes to the test in this brutal precision platformer”

Hmm. Dunno if I’m the right audience for a “brutal precision platformer.” But what the hell, I’ll give it a shot.

Ooooooh it’s a copyright infringement. I get it.

Page 11, Game 24: 6E by Jared Sinclair

So, do you love Powered By The Apocalypse games? And would love to see an Apocalypse-World-style version of Dungeons and Dragons?

Then you already own Dungeon World and are probably very happy.

But! Are you also unable to afford Dungeon World, or would like a version of that ruleset that’s even MORE stripped-down?

Then here ya go.

That’s the niche this game fills: Dungeon World, but smaller and more affordable. Seems serviceable enough if you’re into that sort of thing and are all such veteran RPGers that you don’t need any handholding whatsoever for that whole “gameplay” business.

Not something I particularly need myself. But, perfectly fine for what it is.

What’s next?

Page 53, Game 17: Anaseidos – An anthropomorphic duck race for 5e by C. A. Berlitz

Okay, that sounds like some really wacky D&D shit. I’m in.

Man, am I glad I got a good night’s sleep before I tackled this one.

Page 11, Game 13: PALACE OF WOE, by owch

If you’ve been reading these chronologically, you know that the last game I played managed to actively anger me by being so difficult to learn. That’s pretty much the worst possible headspace to be in for PALACE OF WOE, a creepy-ish lo-fi puzzle solving exploration game that’s taking deliberate pride in its obtuseness.

What the hell is this place? Who are you? What are the rules? What are you trying to do? What are even the controls?

Those are YOU problems, son. Figure it out.

It helps that the game doesn’t seem to have a “fail” condition, as such. When you lose one of the puzzle-fights to one of the many monsters that are just kinda hanging out, the room resets itself. Any progress you’ve made in that room is lost, but otherwise, you’re not really any worse off than you were before.

I figured out the game well enough to play it and even progress a little ways with it, but its refusal to let me know WTF is going on wound up keeping me at such distance that when I felt like I was stuck, I simply bailed. I THINK I was collecting items? I’m not sure. Most of the “fights” you can get into appear entirely optional, unless a monster is standing somewhere you need to move through. Am I supposed to be picking fights? Will I get a cookie if I do?

There was one critter in particular whose iteration of the puzzle fight was fuckin’ brutal, and I ran into two copies of it, both blocking my progress down those paths. Are there items in the game that will improve my puzzle-fighting prowess? Do fights against that guy become easier if I can advance a bit? Or do I need to stop being such a punk and figure out how to muddle through, because nope, it’s never gonna be any easier than this?

It’s not a terrible game; it seems to honestly be exactly the game it’s trying to be, whatever that is. I’m just confident that it isn’t for me.

Okay, time to fire-up my custom Perl script and see where I’m heading to next:

Page 11, Game 24: 6E by Jared Sinclair

“The Sixth Edition, in a way.”

Either somebody didn’t bother filling in all the fields when they put their game up for sale, or this is gonna be meta as fuck.

Teaching your game is kinda important, folks.

Page 52, Game 30: Star Escape, by Ampersand Game Studios

Fuck this game.

During this playthrough, I’ve found games I love, games I respected but that fell short, games that were clearly no more than trifles, games I simply didn’t “get” … but this is the first one that actively pissed me off.

And, yeah, I’ve avoided trying to be too snarky on some of these games, because charity. But you pissed me off, Star Escape. You pissed me off good.

This LOOKS like a professional product — a polished, cute game that should be a lot of fun. You’re just jumping from planet to planet, racing to get to the top of the screen and picking up stuff along the way. It’s meant to be played head-to-head on the same screen, but you CAN set the other competitors to be bots.

Massive Piss-Me-Off Problem #1: The bots have one difficulty setting: Older sibling who resents having to play with you and wants to kick your ass at this game so severely you break down crying and leave them alone. The bots are fucking MERCILESS. Once you fall off the bottom of the screen, game over! You lose!

So if you’re gonna learn this game, you gotta learn FAST. You have literal SECONDS to figure out what the controls are, because you are about to lose AT ALL TIMES.

This brings me to Massive Piss-Me-Off Problem #2: No documentation. In the narrow-ass windows of gameplay, I FINALLY figured out that A and D rotated me left and right, holding down on the spacebar charged my jump, and releasing spacebar caused me to actually jump. It took me at least a dozen games to figure this out; the first dozen games were literally a few seconds of me doing nothing while the bot was all “I win AGAIN, loser! You suck at everything! Why dontcha go cry to MOM about it?!”

Massive Piss-Me-Off Problem #3: Vertical learning curve. The only way to learn this game is with an opponent who is intentionally tanking to keep you in the race. (Though you can absolutely take yourself out with a shitty enough jump, no matter how gracious your opponent is being.) There’s no other way to learn what jumps are worth attempting, or even the rudiments of how the mechanics work. There isn’t even a fuck-around practice mode to try out.

These problems seem fixable; there might be a decent game here if the devs would graciously provide some mechanism for learning it. As it stands, this game was a miserable experience that I wouldn’t recommend for anybody.

Damn, today’s just been all about the extremes, hasn’t it.

Let’s get something queued up for the next session and call it a night.

Page 11, Game 13: PALACE OF WOE, by owch

“sort your self out”

Another video game. Looks like a lo-fi puzzler. Interesting.

For a hot minute there, I though I was actually gonna get two fantastic games in a row.

Page 47, Game 18: Ring of Fire Prologue, by Far Few Giants

A point-and-click neon noir set 40 years years in the future. You’re a London detective, investigating a very fucked-up murder. And your primary tool is: a search engine! Also, GPS. Punch relevant-sounding information into your cop smartphone, see what it pulls out of the cop database. Punch relevant-sounding addresses into your GPS and go there, to follow the clues.

In theory.

In practice … this is a partial prologue for a game that’s still under development. It’s meant to be incomplete. But for the life of me, I have no idea if I hit the end of the content I’m allowed to play, or if I’m just too thick to know what to do next.

Either is possible; the game warns you to TAKE FUCKING NOTES, since it is NOT going to hold your hand about what you need to be doing. Which, okay, cool; I’m actually feeling that. Definitely helps with that detective-investigating-a-mystery vibe. But I’ve entered every name and address I could find and I’m back in the victim’s apartment, stuck.

Even if there’s some clue I missed … didn’t the crime lab say they’d get back to me? Isn’t there more relevant information on the way? I get what the game is shooting for, but I feel like the game is giving me this passive-aggressive blank stare, patiently waiting for me to stop being such a fucking moron.

Unless, of course, that’s just all there is to this prologue version of the game. In which case some sort of “That’s all, folks! See you on release day!” message would have been REALLY appreciated.

This is a very, very, VERY cool looking game. I could see it being awesome. But based on my experience with this demo … I’m not so sure. It’s coming out in 2021; if I see it on Steam for cheap, what the hell, might give it another look.

Okay. What’s next?

Page 52, Game 30: Star Escape, by Ampersand Game Studios

“Intense competitive jumping in space”

Hmm. I do like jumping.

Oh.

My.

God.

Page 7, Game 9: NOISE1, by ChevyRay

Play this fucking game.

I linked to it in its name — I’ve been doing that for all these games just in case you were curious, but this is the first time it’s MATTERED.

You are The Guy In The Chair. Somebody has hacked the system where they’re being held prisoner, but they need help from somebody, dear God ANYBODY, to get them out of it. Someone to twiddle the security settings and distract the guards and the like.

That someone is, naturally, you.

The presentation is pure ASCII art — but don’t worry, you’ll understand what everything means very quickly. This isn’t Dwarf Fortress. Within minutes, the graphics somehow go from being a “limitation” to just another part of the lo-fi atmosphere.

You interact with the world by typing commands. There are moments where you’ll have to type those fuckers FAST, too; Death By Typo befell my poor friend on several occasions. This game is basically a series of puzzles, and there are moments when you have to really freakin’ NAIL the timing. Particularly when–

No, fuck that. No spoilers.

The closest comp I can think of is, no shit, Portal. Maybe without the dark splatstick sense of humor, but in terms of rolling out both its puzzles and the tools available to solve them, the gameplay gives me a HUGE Portal vibe, in the best way possible.

Did I mention this fucker is ASCII art? Did I mention you interact with it by TYPING?

Like Portal, it’s paced beautifully, and gives you enough game to be satisfying without overstaying its welcome. I finished it in about two hours or so, and that felt more or less perfect.

There are a few rough edges. There’s one command, SCAN, that seems somewhat awkwardly integrated into the game. A few of the error messages are misleading; you’ll get the same error message for trying to interact with a non-existent object as you will trying to hit an object that’s simply cooling down. One early stage actually contains misleading information about a mechanic, leading to the next puzzle being much harder than it should be. A given noise can only distract one guard at a time, which you have to figure out yourself by trying (and failing) to do NOISE 2 when both of them are in the correct position. (“Got the one, DAMMIT, the other one still didn’t hear it! Okay, wait a bit, try again….”)

Whatever. These are quibbles.

This is an achievement. This is art. This is worth your time.

The Bundle has long since closed down, but you can buy this on its own for $10. I assure you it is more than worth the price.

This one’s gonna be a bitch to follow. Who gets to try?

Page 47, Game 18: Ring of Fire Prologue, by Far Few Giants

“Serial thriller told through a search bar”

Is this one interactive, or just a story? Let’s find out!

Oh good, a video game entry! I like the ones I can directly engage instead of just reading through the rules and giving my impressions; seems more fair to the work involved and more fun for me. Gives me a much better experience.

Page 23, Game 9: Dawndusk Dream Sewer, by rbatistadelima

Welp. I have no idea what the fuck just happened.

I do not know what this is. Is this someone’s profound artistic statement? A desperate cry for help? A joke?

It’s a video game with old-school isometric 3-D graphics, like Crystal Castles, only pinker. In it, you play a “meat husk” who must explore and listen to the bleak pontifications of this cutesy sewer’s inhabitants. Eventually, you will be given two choices. One is meaningless. The other is whether or not to die.

You will ultimately choose death, if only to see what happens.

There are no ninja turtles.

This game makes me think of Strindberg and Helium, save that I’m not remotely confident it’s actually tongue-in-cheek. It could be deadly serious. It could also be saying something about the juxtaposition of the grim pointlessness of the world and the inherent silliness of the medium. It could also be that the creator has found this review of their game, and is already laughing so hard at my confusion they can barely breathe.

Existence means nothing.

There is only the sewer.

Up next: Page 7, Game 9: NOISE1, by ChevyRay

“A posthuman stealth/horror terminal-operated unicode space opera.”

Ah, we’re in for a nice wallow in the bleakness of existence, I see.

So be it.

Back to the land of micro-RPGs we go.

Page 37, Game 14: Mossy Mechanics!, by Diwata ng Manila

You and your buddies are all sentient piles of moss, awakened by the Other Mother. Now go do stuff. Or don’t. Your game, bro.

My exposure to the mini-games in this collection is making me and Jasmine both realize that we need to venture out in to the space ourselves, which I mean in both the non-bitchy AND the ultra-bitchy ways.

The ultra-bitchy way is, of course, that the barrier to entry is just INCREDIBLY low here, just SO much lower than I would have anticipated. Some of these games clearly have a tremendous amount of thought and effort behind them, but others, emphatically, do not. Mossy Mechanics, despite being in its “4th Edition,” is clearly one of the latter. Three pages of rules, clumsy and uninspired mechanics, and a dashed-off “Eh, just figure it out for yourself” vibe to the vast majority of actual gameplay. COULD this be fun? Look, with the right people, ANYTHING can be fun. Sitting around a table with some scraps of paper and one pen to share between you can be fun if you guys are good at making it fun. In my mind, what makes a game “good” is not whether or not it’s “fun” with the right people, but how much work the game is willing to do to make “fun” the most likely outcome. Mossy Mechanics leaves the responsibility for “fun” very firmly on your shoulders.

But the non-bitchy way this makes me kinda want to start getting stuff of my own out there is how, despite the weird half-assedness of this actual ruleset, it’s very clear to me that SOMEBODY has had a blast playing this. Some goofball created a game for their buddies where they sat around pretending to be sentient moss, loved the hell out of it, and then had a grand time trying to translate that experience into some simple rules. Did they do a GREAT job of turning that experience into rules anybody could just pick up and play themselves? No. No, they did not. But they clearly had a lovely time doing it. And I suspect that for every nine people like me who pick up this ruleset and are all “Meh, this is nothing,” there’s gonna be a tenth who’s going to be all “Roll-play as MOSS? Oh, that’s fuckin’ HILARIOUS!” and puts forth the mental energy necessary to make this game come to life.

For real, sincerely, that’s pretty cool.

On we go, to Page 23, Game 9: Dawndusk Dream Sewer, by rbatistadelima

“Come forth mortal, the sewers beckon!!”

Will there be ninja turtles?

There might be ninja turtles.

…

…

I…?

…

Okay, let’s get fuckin’ weird with it.

It will be Page 50, Game 7: Arigatou, Ningen-san!, by by Michelle

At its heart, this game is about consent, and how consent makes everything okay.

You have just moved into a new neighborhood, and the local critters are desperate to be touched. They would like you to pet them, please, using the touch screen on your mobile device. (Though your mouse will do if you must.) And by “pet” they mean “hideously deform.”

You find a creature. You touch the creature. The creature will inform you how it likes to be touched. Adorable music plays. You “pet” the creature, causing them to contort their bodies in ghastly, unnatural ways, all while horrifying squishing sound effects emerge. All the while, hearts drift up to the top of the screen indicating their deep, deep satisfaction with the Lovecraftian parody of a massage you are administering.

You “pet” the creature, causing its satisfaction level to rise and rise until finally it indicates that you’ve massaged it to completion and OH MY FUCK I just got that and I feel so filthy, and the creature wanders off, leaving you free to find the next one.

I won the game. All the creatures were waiting for me back at my house, presumably for me to … erm … “pet” … at my leisure.

I feel disturbed, and not great about myself. Also, the game is adorable and hilarious and Jasmine and I were laughing at a whole lot of it.

It is, very definitely, a thing that exists, and not a thing I need to ever think about again.

Cleanse my palate, random number generator.

We move on to Page 37, Game 14: Mossy Mechanics!, by Diwata ng Manila

“A game about being sentient plants”

Sure. Yes. Plants. Nice friendly plants. I’m in.

Well wasn’t that just topical as all hell.

Page 54, Game 17: Lacrymo Tennis 2016 (+ 2018), by Les Jeux d’la Tête

Les hommes are protesting! Something! Probably not what we’ve been protesting lately, because the French have their own shit going on, but, you know, protesting! But oh, no! Les gendarmes! Police brutality is truly the universal language, and those cochones are indiscriminately chucking tear gas into the crowd!

But luckily for the crowd, you happen to love democracy almost as much as you love sports! So you’re gonna dive in there with your tennis racket and send those canisters of war crimes back where they came from!

This is a very, very silly game. In the base 2016 version, you’re constantly windmilling your tennis racket around and around, meaning you need to position yourself to swat the canisters off the ground during the upstroke phase of the animation. In the more advanced 2018 version, you actually control swinging your tennis racket with a mouse button. You thwack, you cough, you thwack some more.

There’s a real game under here somewhere, but whoever wrote it clearly was not in possession of enough fucks to bother bringing it out. What, precisely, am I being rewarded for here? Am I trying to swat the canisters while they’re in the air? That’s more challenging than just thwacking them from the ground so I’d think so, but no, there doesn’t seem to be any inherent reward for that. What makes the tear gas exhaust me faster? Will my lungs last longer the less time the tear gas hangs around? I’d think so, but I’m weirdly uncertain. How do I, like, DO WELL at this game?

I’m honestly not sure.

But randomly smacking police stupidity with a tennis racket makes for a perfectly acceptable way to kill fifteen minutes or so.

And this sumbitch is free! Go click the link at the top of the page for some old-school Flash game excitement.

What’s next? Will it be as topical?

It will be Page 50, Game 7: Arigatou, Ningen-san!, by by Michelle

“An interactive story about squishing animals”

Erm.

By “squish,” you better damn well mean “hug enthusiastically,” game. You do look adorable, so that’s what I’m going to hope for.