Month: June 2020

Looks like the Playthrough would like me to learn something about the immigrant experience.

Page 20, Game 12: Far From Home, by ehronlime

This one’s an indie tabletop roleplaying storytelling game, somewhere between a one-page and Apocalypse World in complexity. The players are all strangers in a strange land, attempting to thrive in a culture not their own. Seems to be taking some cues from Apocalypse World in terms of giving each player a kind of archetype to play (“The Seeker,” “The Exile,” The Transient,” etc.), but without as much mechanical distinction.

This is a very rules-light game in general, but with enough structure to feel like it’s still, you know, a game. Like a lot of storytelling-style games, this one looks like it’s going to depend very heavily on its players for a sense of direction; I feel like if you’ve got one or two players willing and able to lay down a solid structure, the game has enough substance for everybody else to work within that.

More so than a lot of games like this, however, this one feels like it REALLY needs you to lay down a strong sense of the world you’re in, and a reading of the rules leaves me concerned that it’s on the players to figure that out. If you’re going to explore what it’s like to live in a culture not your own, seems like you need a pretty firm sense of both where you are and from whence you came, and the game doesn’t seem to spend a lot of time encouraging you to figure those details out. Heck, it was a ways into the game before I figured out that it was encouraging you to build a fantasy or sci-fi world to explore together. But the rules don’t devote much space to that.

However, the rules also don’t specify that every interaction you have with the culture you’re living in should be as racist and condescending as humanly possible, so at least there’s a lot more room to explore nuance than the previous game had.

This isn’t one I’d be eager to play, necessarily, but if someone I trusted was eager to run a session of it, I’d gladly ask for a seat at that table. It strikes me as a tad underbaked for my liking, but overall, not bad.

All right, RNG. Are we gonna keep doing the immigrant thing?

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

“No one does bourgeois revolution quite like the French.”

Is this a sports game? A revolutionary game? Both?

Let’s find out!

Back to video games we go.

Page 5, Game 14: Four Horsemen, by Nuclear Fishin’ Software

Maaaan. Talking smack about a one-page RPG adventure is one thing. But this … this is clearly somebody’s baby.

This is an interactive-novel style game about four kids of a Foreign ethnicity — two locally-born boys, two refugee sisters — making their way in a country that will take every opportunity available to be over-the-top racist as fuck to them. I suspect there is one absolute hell of a game hiding under this one, but I simply was NOT feeling it. The story is awkwardly presented, and I was too confused about the basics of what was happening to be fully engaged. (Are they ALL refugees? No, just the girls. Is this a new home they’re creating? No, it’s just like an afterschool clubhouse. Do they ALL have families they can go home to, or is it just James? I … think they do? I’m still not sure. Why is that racist local just a slightly palate-swapped version of Tough Girl? That HAS to mean something, right?)

There’s a crafting system that seems weirdly inconsequential. There’s a resource-gathering mechanism that I’m pretty sure is meant to make me feel how frustrating it is to not be able to afford anything and just get by on scraps, but it just felt clumsy and arbitrary.

Meaningful decision points felt few and far between. Most of the time, it’s just click and read, click and read, click and read.

I really, really want to be engaged by this game; it’s very clearly coming from someone with something to say. But my experience was just too frustrating. The ending I got was clearly a terrible one, but for the life of me I’m not sure how I got there or what it all meant. I wasn’t moved, I was just … annoyed.

Also, no fascists were punched, ever. Extra frustration.

Ah, well. They’re not all gonna be winners.

Perhaps the next one will be better.

And that next one is Page 20, Game 12: Far From Home, by ehronlime

“A game about immigrants and outsiders”

Ah, looks like I’ll be staying with a theme here.

Hey, it’s the first LARP I’ve stumbled across!

Page 45, Game 25: Plasty: A Thing of Beauty, by Tinker Taylor Publications

You and your friends get together and pretend to be in the waiting room of a plastic surgeon’s office. Why do you want plastic surgery? What do you hope to get from it? Talk about it with each other.

That’s the game.

Up next: Page 5, Game 14: Four Horsemen, by Nuclear Fishin’ Software

“Leave home. Start anew. Punch racists.”

Aw yeah.

For an exciting change of pace, I think I’ll actually PLAY one of these tabletop devils instead of just looking over the rules.

Page 27, Game 28: HOT GAY BRO DRAGONS, by Riverhouse Games

A game for two people totally into each other, and would like to express it. By pretending to be a pair of gay dragons.

This game is all about imagining yourselves as huge fire-breathing beasts who are totally into each other, and just can’t stop complementing each other. For real, the game is a series of guided questions about what kinds of dragons you are, with directives to tell each other why that’s AWESOME. Also, there is treasure. When you really like something your dragon-bro says about you, give him some treasure!

I found it adorable. Didn’t quite work for Jasmine, though. She didn’t appreciate the directive to get super pun-tastic with it. Like how HOT we are. Cuz dragons. Get it? It was honestly a bit TOO loosey-goosey for her liking; there’s not much here other than swapping compliments back and forth.

But even if it didn’t quite work for her, she found it to be a pleasant way to spend twenty minutes. I feel like that’s the floor for how much you’ll dig this game if you and your partner are comfortable with verbal affection: at the very least, it’s a pleasant way to hang with each someone you love.

Also, I got to describe laying back on a big ol’ glacier in Norway watching the northern lights, just melting my dragon self into the ice.

If you have a partner who’d like to pretend to be a dragon with you, it’s absolutely worth a look.

All right, what’s next?

Page 45, Game 25: Plasty: A Thing of Beauty, by Tinker Taylor Publications

“A LARP in the plastic surgeon’s waiting room”

Yeah, guessing I’m not gonna be playing this one, either. But let’s see if it makes me think that I should.

It’s a zine! About … a game? I think?

Page 30, Game 18: Prismot!: A Troikawave Zine, Issue 1, by Jared Sinclair

CONTEXT IS FOR COWARDS.

This is a zine. It is for a game. I think. The layout is done as a kind of tribute to 80’s tech. Whoever designed this appears to be quite good at graphic layout, and has devoted all their skills to making this feel awful yet somehow perfectly readable. It is offends the senses, but conveys its information cleanly. You have to be very good at what you do to be this deliberately bad at it.

The first six pages are all playable character options, I think. Living Marble Statue! Glitch Priest! Schoolgirl! Flamingo Man! Poolboy! Sexy Android!

How, precisely, are these character archetypes linked to one another such that they all deserve to be in the same zine? How do they fit within the world of this presumed game?

THESE THINGS ARE IRRELEVANT. CONTEXT IS FOR COWARDS.

There are 3-D glasses as a magic item. (Be careful not to get them wet.) The background art physically hurts. There is a d66 chart of things you find either in the trash or on the body. There are some spells, allowing you to create off-brand La Croix, or magic arrows, or snoop on what some electrons have been up to.

There are NPC/monsters — Monitor Golem and Pool Grannies. And there are 3-D glasses for you to print and cut out as a prop for use in your games!

And that’s it. That’s your zine. Just some stuff to toss into your game, or not.

YOU WANTED SOME SORT OF CONTEXT TO PUT THESE IN? SOME OBVIOUS THEME TO TIE IT ALL TOGETHER? LICK MY BALLSACK. CONTEXT IS FOR COWARDS.

A quick Google search reveals Troika is indeed an RPG. I’m guessing it’s made out of pure distilled madness, like some sort of Principia Discorida LARP.

I am the wrong person to run this game. But if I had certain friends running it, I’m thinking I want in.

I’ve been meaning to try shrooms.

Hey, is it part of the bundle?!

…

Nope.

Damn.

Okay. Let’s drop some dice, random.org:

Page 27, Game 28: HOT GAY BRO DRAGONS, by Riverhouse Games

“A game about telling your boyfriend (who is a dragon) about how much you love him.”

Why the hell not.

Okay, so now I’m a music critic too.

Dope.

Page 46, Game 8: Desktop Dungeons OST, by dannyBstyle

In this bundle, I’m not at all confident I’ve come anywhere near either the floor or the ceiling in terms of quality. In the short time I’ve been doing this, I’ve seen everything from a half-assed one-page adventure to a fully fleshed-out professional RPG that I’d give serious thought to paying full retail price for if I saw it on a shelf at Origins. (Hey, remember game conventions? Those were awesome. I hope they’re not gone forever.)

How bad can bad get here? How good is good? I have no idea.

However, I can say that the soundtrack at the heart of this entry definitely falls on the High-End Professional scale of what this bundle has to offer.

I’m totally unfamiliar with this game; based on the title, I’m thinking dungeon crawler. Based on the soundtrack alone, I’m intrigued. This is some damned fine high-fantasy background music. If I ever run a fantasy RPG again, this may well be the music I play. Hell, I may play this sucker when I’m doing one of my regular D&D games from my PC, seeing as gaming in person is SO an outdated artifact of the before-times known as February.

Maybe someone who’s played a fuckton of fantasy games would be all “Nah, bro, this is some samey bullshit; they totally ripped this off from Dragon Poker VII and GloopQuest: Heavenfall.” But to my ignorant ears, this sounds great. Lots of variety, lots of energy, lots of wacky song names; gotta appreciate a soundtrack with entries like Goats N’ Goblins, The Dragon With the Girl Tattoo, or Whaaarrgarrrbl. (I really wanna know the context of that last one.) The soundtrack is also available on Spotify, and it’s definitely on my radar now as something to listen to that isn’t gonna distract me with words and shit.

In fact, this soundtrack is so good, I’m gonna cheat! I’m not rolling the next entry at random! I’m just gonna skip directly to Desktop Dungeons!

Assuming it’s in the bundle.

… and it is not.

*sigh*

It is on Steam, though, for $15. Maybe if I hadn’t just given myself a gaming to-do list that stretches until retirement, I could check it out.

Okay. Back to the randomizer. And we go now to:

Page 30, Game 18: Prismot!: A Troikawave Zine, Issue 1, by Jared Sinclair

“Or: How to run a vaporwave campaign in Troika!”

There are zines here?

Well, why wouldn’t there be.

Let’s do a zine!

I spent most of my time tonight getting this blog up and running, so that I could put these little playthroughs somewhere other than my Facebook page. Such words! Very express!

Anyway. On to the next game. Let’s get cubey with it!

Page 57, Game 3: Cubefall, by Cavvvalry

(Edit: This game can currently be found on Page 56, Game 17.)

Back to the video game side of things, where I find a minimalist 3D puzzler in the vein of an old-school Tetris knockoff. You’re looking down a four-sided rectangular chute, with a steady supply of cubes raining down. When you fill in enough cubes at the bottom to form a complete square, poof! They vanish! And to encourage optimal cube placement, you use the arrow keys to rotate your chute.

This feels like it’s reallllllly close to being a pretty solid little game. The problem is the interface. When you rotate your chute to adjust where the incoming cubes will land, there’s no sort of easing animation to carry you from one state to the next. Just an abrupt POOF! The chute is instantly in its new location!

I found it remarkably difficult to visualize what any give state of the board was going to be, and I think that lack of transitional animation contributed to that. Or maybe it didn’t; maybe my spatial visualization just wasn’t up to the task. Regardless, I felt like I was spending most of the game flailing around more or less at random.

I suspect that if I spent enough time playing this one — like, say, the amount of time the developer has no doubt spent on it — that ability to visualize it well enough to actually be playing it would start to come. But do I actually WANT to spend that time here?

Honestly, not really. I don’t think there’s just enough there here. As far as I can tell, the base game is the entire game: cubes fall, make ’em fall as far as you can. I assume they’ll start falling faster, eventually. The harder difficulty settings cause the play area to twist around to further confound your spatial awareness, which definitely increases the challenge, but in a way that calls attention to what I find frustrating about the game in the first place.

So Cubefall winds up left in an unfortunate no-man’s land; too inaccessible for a casual time waster, not interesting enough to invest more than casual time in it.

Ah, well. They’re not all gonna be winners.

Okay, next game:

Page 46, Game 8: Desktop Dungeons OST, by dannyBstyle

Not a game at all; an original soundtrack for a game. Maybe this game is in the bundle! Or not! Either way, I’ve finally landed on something I can knock off this list while I’m at work tomorrow.

Back to the tabletop we go, and it’s a big’un.

Page 55, Game 12: Costume Fairy Adventures by Penguin King Games

(Edit: This game can currently be found on Page 55, Game 11.)

Oh my fuck, this looks fantastic.

Based on what I’d seen elsewhere in the bundle, I was primed to expect some dashed-off pamphlet with a handful of random tables and vague admonitions to go get your mischief on, but NOPE. This is a 300+-page rulebook, with a printable deck of over 100 cards for your fairy costumes, with adorable artwork and a clean layout and and and….

This looks FUN.

Players are all fairies, looking to get into trouble. (The intro comic features fairies trying to steal a train in order to jump it over a castle, because that sounds fukkin’ RAD. They succeed! Next order of business: landing it.) The rules lay out your options very clearly, but like the best big RPGs, it looks like it’s giving you a ton of choice without an overbearing amount of mechanics. The rules themselves look simple without being trivial, and encourage creativity.

This looks like it’d be an absolute hoot with players who take a mindset that they wanna go out there and make some shit HAPPEN. I’d play a one-shot of this. I’d play a campaign of this.

Yeah. This is the sort of gem I was hoping this RNG-powered trawl would let me stumble across. When I can have people in my game room again, this is absolutely a candidate to hit the table.

Nice job, random.org. Now give me another one so I’ll know what I’m doing when I pick this back up tomorrow.

Page 57, Game 3: Cubefall, by Cavvvalry

“Rotational Row-Clearing Action!”

Looks like a potential time-gobbler if it’s fun.

And we’re back to the video games:

Page 2, Game 16: Micro Mages, by Morphcat Games

Man, do I need to get a game controller for my laptop. Between this and a game I was playing last night, if I’m going to keep doing arcade-style stuff on this machine, I need an arcade-style controller.

Micro Mages is literally made for the Nintendo Entertainment System, though the download thoughtfully comes with its own emulator, which is a couple of orders of magnitude larger than the code simulating the actual game. (But then again, that’s true of the PDF representing the game manual, too.)

It’s cute and fun, though I think having a proper controller and not just banging arrow keys would enhance the experience quite a bit. Like the games it draws inspiration from, quite unforgiving; you’re perpetually one oopsie away from death. (Though I don’t recall Mario ever ending in a blood splotch.)

It’s a side-scroller where you’re a tiny little mage dude, bouncing around and blasting skeletons and bats and stuff with your little pew-pew spell. I think you’re there to rescue a princess? There’s always a princess. I’m willing to bet she’s not in this tower.

Also, there are crates! Blast them! Some of them have treasures, which give you points! You like points, right? Or a fairy, who will allow you to take TWO hits before you die! Or a seagull you can mount on your back for in-air shenanigans!

Unlike most side-scrollers, this one progresses vertically; you need to jump your way up the tower. Through a bit of trial and error, I eventually figured out that the key mechanic is to fling yourself against a wall and press yourself against it, slowing your fall and allowing you to jump again.

Of course, before long, the game starts slowly scrolling upwards, regardless of whether or not your making progress. If you fall off the bottom, you die in an adorable spurt of 8-bit blood.

I feel like it’s a tad too unforgiving for its own good. Yeah, the games from the era didn’t fuck around with any kind of hand-holding, but even so, this one’s rough. Having the map start scrolling of its own accord is a step too far; the game is challenging enough without adding what feels like an artificial ticking clock element. At the very least, maybe don’t unleash that until the second castle?

But honestly? This is a cute, fun little game. If I could load it into the NES emulator on my Nintendo Switch, I probably would, just to see how it plays. If I do get a controller I like, I could see coming back to this.

The game is also set up to allow up to four players — SIMULTANEOUSLY. Which feels like it would be such a howling clusterfuck of boinging and pew-pewing that I actually want to try it sometime.

Not bad at all.

All right, random.org. Roll me a good one:

Page 55, Game 12: Costume Fairy Adventures by Penguin King Games

“A tabletop RPG about fairies. In costumes. Having adventures.”

I’mma guess this one is exactly what it says on the tin.

Time for an adventure!

Page 42, Game 24: Na Escuridão (In the Darkness), by Minakie

(Edit: This game can currently be found on Page 42, Game 23.)

“Look, it’s a Hundred Floors of Frights. They’re not all gonna be winners.”

Negative reviews are fun when you’re punching up; most of the people responsible for Cats being the nightmare clusterfuck it is are wealthy and powerful, and will likely never know I even existed; that shit is fair game.

But going HAM on something that was basically donated to charity by someone who worked on it largely just for the love? That’s … that’s just mean.

So I’ll go easy on In The Darkness.

It’s a system-agnostic one-shot adventure that fits onto a single sheet of paper by virtue of teeny tiny print. And….

Some tropes you embrace, some tropes you avoid. The Big Twist in this adventure would be one of the latter — for very good reason. It’s not offensive or in bad taste; I just worry that if I ran this, the rest of the table would come away thinking I’d just wasted their damn time.

Though to be fair, I HAVE seen this twist pulled-off successfully before; my friend did it in a D&D game, and it was kinda fuckin’ epic. The context was radically different, but still, he made it work. So maybe it’s worth a look if you’re GM and you’re in a challenge-yourself kinda mood.

I’ll pass, though.

Okay, who’s next…..

Page 2, Game 16: Micro Mages, by Morphcat Games

“A platformer developed for the NES. Now available on PC! ROM included.”

Ooh. This looks promising.