Basic Mysteries of Life: Eldritch

Eldritch is a terrific little game. Drawing from the Lovecraft mythos, it gives you procedurally-generated levels full of increasingly-terrifying monsters to sneak, fight, and explore your way through. It doesn't bother with story: You wake up in a mysterious, infinite library with a handful of glowing books. Opening one transports you to a world where you must survive the strange to return to the library with one of the souls of the gods of that place. Return all three, and you unlock a mysterious door in the library.

Monsters are fish-people who glub and robed wizards who grunt. They react to sounds, which means they can chase down your gunshots or run toward that rock you just threw. Mix in the Minecraft aesthetic and destructible terrain (mostly through dynamite at first), and later indestructible monsters, and you have a strong recipe for delicious gaming.

It grew after its initial offering, too. Originally with three worlds, the creator added a Halloween world and a mysterious ice-world staffed with invincible penguins, among other monsters. Pickaxes, tripwire guns, hatchets, and more gear also appeared in the expansions.

There's a lot to explore, and while I admit I don't have the patience to start another game after dying this close to beating the third world and having to start over, it's a game I'll return to from time to time.

You can buy Eldritch on Steam or on its own site for $14.99.

Full-Contact Gardening: Lili: Child of Geos

Imagine you're a university student finishing up your degree on magical plants. Not that much of a stretch, right? As part of your final thesis, possibly your dissertation, you travel to the far-off island of Geos and discover it to be inhabited by a society of animated, wooden constructs and the spirits who created and oppress them. (Plus one Information Fish who provides occasional exposition when not insulting you.)

The game looks and feels like a Gamecube-era adventure game, like something out of the Zelda franchise. It has that feel as you run around the colorful town, talking to people with their bubbles of repeating text, and bursting into people's homes and opening their treasure right in front of them.

I hesitated to do that last one. Lots of the game's many treasure chests are in out-of-the-way places, tucked into homes closed off by order of the mayor, but one early chest is in the home of one of the constructs. And he's home, watching you. After a half-hour's play determined that the game expects you to open every chest, I went back and stole all his goods before his eyes, to no consequence other than becoming marginally richer.

Besides currency, each chest contains unique items, each an homage to some other video game. The collection features a "plumber's hat," a "hero's shield," and a ninja sword suspiciously stained with fruit juice. Nearly all of them are extraneous, but the game surprised me when two wound up having a use in the game's explore-until-you-find-a-solution puzzles.

As you play, you learn that besides being oppressive, the spirits are plain jerks. They steal the flowers that you pick for your thesis, and thus begins your quest to acquire magical flowers by stealing them from where they grow on spirits' heads. This is the main gameplay skill to learn: you ride the spirit like a rodeo bull, yanking flowers off its head while avoiding thorns that make it harder to hold on. Get enough before the spirit throws you and you can pick its red spirit flower, defeating that spirit. The construct resistance requires that you return with yea-many red flowers before they'll help you to the next stage of the game.

The minigame feels like it was designed for a touchscreen, and a bit of research reveals that Child of Geos was first published for the iPad. And while I call it a minigame, it's really the main part of the game. There's no other skill curve to ascend; the rest of the game is exploration and talking to enough people in the right order that you unlock the next batch of spirits to wrangle.

Standing on a bipod of exploration and full-contact flower-picking, both legs need to stand strong. The spirit rodeo was not engaging, and the exploration... varies. The writing is irregular and seems almost divided at times. Much of the text, such as the spirit profiles you see after defeating them, relies on tired, stereotypical jokes: this one is female and doesn't want to give its weight, or another lists her age as 16 on some days and 21 on others. This one is male and likes to watch.

In contrast, some of the dialogue is clever, self-aware, and mature (as opposed to juvenile). When you rescue a construct from a building you unlocked ages ago, you point out that she could have left any time. Her reply? It feels so good to be the hero, and she didn't want to take that from you. The flying mailbox-slash-mailman visits at first to bring letters, but then because it's worrying about Lili, and it helps Lili figure out what she really wants.

In the end, the core gameplay is unexciting, and the inventive, interesting dialogue is at least matched by the derivative or outright insulting bits.

Lili: Child of Geos is available on Steam for $3.99, or apparently on the iPad.

Mine's Bigger: Massive Chalice

This article was supposed to be some kind of dick joke, but instead, I'm too amazed: Why didn't anyone tell me that Massive Chalice is basically X-Com Fantasy Edition? I would've played it rather than let it sit in my Steam library for months. I'm not sure that knowing earlier would've led to me finishing the game, though. I've made it halfway to... well, I'm getting ahead of myself. The title says nothing about the game, and strikes me as something of a joke. Someone a Double Fine thought embodying the game's joint narrators in a giant cup was funny, and they named the game after it. At least that's my guess. And I'm not saying the people in my imagination are wrong, just that it's one reason the game sat, within reach but ignored, like a cup of tea that's spent too long cooling.

Massive Chalice is the story of a small nation besieged by monsters. Gameplay takes place in two arenas: the national stage, where you manage bloodlines to breed better heroes; and the battlefield, where you command your latest batch of heroes in fighting the monsters.

They execute the tactical combat well. You have three main classes, or hybrids thereof, and take advantage of their stealth, range, toughness, and burst attacks to destroy your enemies. Use line-of-sight and each hero's two actions wisely to find and eliminate the threat. It works well, and is basically identical to X-Com except with less of a cover system.

Between battles, you manage your kingdom, trying to keep it alive for three hundred years so the massive, talking chalice that advises you can gather enough power to destroy all the monsters everywhere. You assign heroes to marry and raise the next generation of heroes; your choices determine the next generation's heroic classes, hereditary traits, and learned traits. The choices are difficult, because assigning a hero to breed removes him or her from the fighting pool. You must weigh the benefit between keeping your good heroes in the field or letting them pass that experience on to a new generation.

You also select research projects to improve your heroes' armor, weapons, available items, and so on. As if the combat wasn't enough, I think this pushed me over into the game feeling just like X-Com.

So, at this point I've elected not to finish the game. I'm a bit more than halfway through the three-century chalice-charging process, and I feel trapped. My bloodlines produce nothing but the alchemist and alchemist-hybrid classes, which limits my combat options significantly. I just hit the point where I felt like I could manage the monsters well with foresight, cleverness, and a bit of luck, and the game upped all the monster difficulties on me. I recognize the need to keep a game challenging, but I feel like they just pulled the rug out from under my advancement.

The other reason is that the story just isn't there. X-Com had a series of plot-driven missions, taking aliens captive or capturing new technology. I could also interact with the engineer and scientist for some personality. Here, there's only the next mission and the long-term, unchanged story goal of reaching the three-hundred-year goal. Part of me wants to see it through to the end, but the rest of me knows I'll be more frustrated than happy doing so. And I can watch the ending on YouTube.

Massive Chalice is available in early access from Steam for $29.99. Note that since the game is still in development, just like this article's dick joke. I played the late February, 2015 build.

@ Is for Adventurer: Brogue

What I love about Roguelikes are the endless exploration afforded by procedural dungeon generation, experimentation with tactics from all the magic items, and a learning curve to tease my intellect.

Brogue delivers all those in spades, an excellent example of a modern-day Roguelike that follows in the footsteps of Nethack, Angband, and of course Rogue. It includes the other hallmarks of a Roguelike: permanent character death and ASCII graphics, and just describing it makes me want to go play it. (I admit it. I did go play it.) What makes Brogue stand out is two things: It streamlined and simplified the often-complex Roguelike game, and it brought a modern UI sensibility to the genre.

Acknowledging the invention of the computer mouse is a big deal. You can play the entire game without touching the keyboard if you like, though I found I preferred a mix of keyboard and mouse control. It came in most handy for dealing with my inventory and for quick-traveling to places I'd already visited after clearing most of a level. That alone saved lots of time.

Additionally, the game makes wonderful use of color, displaying degree of enemy wounds, showing alarms and magical effects rush outward in a wash of color, and displaying your inevitable hallucinations in a brilliant technicolor.

The game is also kinder than many of its brethren. It will stop automoves and alert you when something changes, as well as asking you to confirm when you want to do something that sounds stupid, such as jump into a chasm or drink a potion of incineration.

Simplifying the game has done much more for Brogue than the UI modifications. There are fewer distinct magical items and monsters, and far fewer commands than in its Roguelike forebears. There are fewer options in general, starting with character generation: there is none. Every character begins identical. It's the equipment you choose later on as you explore that sets you apart, and equipment is the only way you advance your character:

Potions of strength make you stronger, potions of life give you more hit points, better equipment makes you hit harder or harder to hit, magic staffs and charms give you distinct powers, and scrolls of enchantment make your gear better. You don't earn experience points, and fighting monsters gets you nothing but pain.

This is simpler, and it opens up an opportunity to make the game about cleverness instead of might. Since there's no reason to fight, it's a viable strategy to sneak around monsters and avoid them as they wander the dungeon. In many games, including many Roguelikes, you have to fight enemies for experience points even if you'd rather ghost through a level. That discovery alone multiplied the length of my interest in Brogue by at least two.

I am interested in some additional complexity, because the limited number of magic items gets somewhat repetitive. At the same time, I'm far from mastering all the many uses of even this limited selection. I'd also like to see the interesting experimentation start earlier. Perhaps if every character started with a special power instead of having to search for a level or three to discover a neat tool.

You can download Brogue for free.

Endless Review: Endless Legend

My typical pattern with a 4X game, such as Civilization, Master of Orion 3, Galactic Civilizations, and so on is to play intensely for a couple days, realize how it devours my time and mind, and quit. The games are clearly fun, but after a couple plays at standard difficulty, there's nothing more for me to discover. I can make myself incrementally better, improving my efficiency notch by notch until I can beat AIs on higher difficulty settings, but that doesn't appeal to me. It's honing a skill that I'm never going to use anywhere else. I've already seen what there is to see, and replaying with another culture with different bonuses isn't different enough and hasn't been since I replayed Master of Orion 2 as the Psilons about a hundred times when I was fourteen.

Endless Legend isn't proof against that, but it does the best job of getting around the obstacle that I've ever seen. First, each playable faction breaks fundamental game rules in distinct ways, making them play very differently. Broken Lords don't need food, instead purchasing/creating new population with Dust (the game's magic-source-cum-currency). Roving Clans can move their cities on the backs of giant beetles, and can ban others from the marketplace. Cultists don't found new cities, instead making one giant city and converting minor villages to their cause. And so on.

On top of the unique mechanical advantage, each faction has a unique series of quests. The quest system is an addition to the game that I haven't seen before: accomplish a goal and get a reward. You can pick up minor quests from exploring the abandoned ruins scattered around the world, or by parleying with minor faction villages to turn them to your side. There are only so many minor quests, and they lost their luster when they started repeating after just a single full game.

But the faction-based quests are different. They tell a larger story of your faction's ascension to dominance over the world and grant access to faction-unique technology. And I love story. I want the story. Which is why my third playthrough left me miffed, when I realized that the next step in the quest chain was impossible to finish before the game reached its turn limit and awarded me victory by default. It really took the spark away to know I couldn't finish the tale. If I keep playing Endless Legend, it will be to see what the rest of the factions do and read their stories.

Combat is the one place I found Endless Legend to fall short. The game makes a big deal of using its exploration map as a local map for tactical combat, distributing your stacked units on the battlefield for combat. You place them in a deployment phase, then have six rounds to tell your units roughly what to do: either go here or target this unit. Then you release them, and they do something that vaguely resembles what you asked.

Often, one unit moved to attack and took a spot that another unit needed, making it so the second unit couldn't attack this round. Or an enemy went before your unit and provoked its counterattack, taking away its turn so now it can't do anything. Combat is also slow. In the end, I just selected automatic combat resolution every time, letting the game tell me who won quickly.

The game also falls short in stability. It had a habit of crashing on me. Sometimes I'd play through most of a game with only one or two crashes, but other times it would crash every other turn. (Granted, those are pretty long turns, but still.) It often happened when the season changed, and it would affect the course of the game, pushing back the season change by a turn because of the way the game recorded such things during the crash. It is good about autosaving every turn. If it weren't, I'd never have had the patience to replay an hour or more of game, and this review would've been very different.

All in all, I've had a very good time with Endless Legend. It's a fun game, and it's a pretty game, and it's inspired me to explore more 4Xs in search of what else I want in the genre. It found a way to keep me coming back past the initial rush of learning the rules, and that makes it far more valuable than most of its counterparts. I also have a lot of respect for Amplitude Studios and their ambitious cross-game Endless-series, at least tangentially sharing setting between this and their other games, Endless Space (a space 4X that I also enjoyed) and Dungeon of the Endless (which I'll likely play in the future).

Endless Legend is available from Steam for $34.99.

It's Pronounced Shoe-Limb-Uh: Lords of Xulima

Lords of Xulima is a first offering from fledgling game studio Numantian Games. The company funded the game through Kickstarter on the promise of an old-school isometric CRPG, like classics Ultima, Might & Magic, and Wizardry, and claiming inspiration from Baldur's Gate, Final Fantasy, and others. I only played a handful of those games, so I'm going to compare Lords of Xulima to my nostalgia-idealized favorites: Ultima 6 and Final Fantasy 3/6. The game lacks what I remember most fondly from Ultima, the freedom to move through the world and explore, ignoring the plot should you so choose; and the flexibility to interact with NPCs in depth, navigating their dialog trees with actual typing. Lords of Xulima gates regions by guarding them with enemies far above your level, opening them for exploration mostly at set times only. NPCs barely exist. They are there to buy up spare loot, sell gear and training, and dispense exposition. Other than that, they are window dressing. They stand in place at all hours, even through the game's largely-irrelevant day/night cycle, and quickly run out of anything interesting to say.

The combat system had enough detail to engage me for a while. Tactically (not visually), it resembles a Final Fantasy game of old. You place characters in a front row and a back row and your attacks manifest as slashes with minimal animation. Just like in Final Fantasy, the spells get far more animation than anything else. There's also a tactical choice of weapons that cause bleed, wounds, or stun.

Bleed deals additional damage over time. I found it mostly useless because the levels of bleed were tiny compared to the enemies' hit points. Wounds stack to penalize attacks and defense. Stun delays the target's next turn. The choice of which you equip on which characters adds some depth to gameplay, as does whom you attack with which at any time. I wound up relying heavily on stun, accidentally since I didn't know what any of those things did when I started playing. (The manual wasn't yet complete.) My main bruiser wound up with high-success, high-stun attacks able to knock most enemies back in the initiative order enough that they rarely got a turn, especially combined with the wizard's stun-inflicting lightning spells.

Some enemies, particularly bosses, resist stun and put me at a disadvantage. It's a necessity for powerful stand-alone monsters, and an interesting characteristic of some monsters. But monsters that appeared to be susceptible to stun sometimes started ignoring it in a pattern I found opaque. After planning a series of attacks designed to delay all the enemies and keep my team kicking uninterrupted ass, to have a monster start ignoring my stunning attacks out of nowhere was annoying.

The other trouble with combat is that as levels went up, combat became a slog. At higher levels, monsters have upwards of a thousand hit points, and your heroes do thirty to forty damage in a shot, spiking to around a hundred if you burn resources to boost them. So it can take ten minutes for a single fight, after which you have to do it again, because that fight was random and not in any way relevant to the plot.

Lords of Xulima tells its story in awkward spurts of exposition. Prophetic dreams (with unnecessary voiceover) and occasional dialogue, primarily with enemies, make up the large part of the story. As it progresses, the game hints that the main character is mistaken about the nature of the world and the righteousness of his quest. Through the main character's stubbornness, his stance on the matter rapidly diverged from mine, so the longer I played, the more disconnected I felt from the character I was playing.

One thing that pleased me: the puzzles. They aren't common, but for the first time in at least a decade I had to make a map to beat a teleportation puzzle. That really took me back, and I enjoyed it a great deal. On the other hand, another puzzle wasn't well-designed, defying my logic and requiring me to find the answer online. The designers also did well with the minigame to defuse traps, though the lock-picking minigame is less engaging and more of a money sink (since it inevitably breaks some of your lockpicks).

In the end, Lords of Xulima didn't manage to capture my attention long enough to finish it. After fifty-plus hours, I'm ready to give myself a break and stop the repetitive monster-bashing.

Lords of Xulima is available for $19.99 on Steam.

You Will Hate Buffalo: Super Amazing Wagon Adventure Turbo

Someone took Oregon Trail nostalgia and asked, "How over the top absurd can I make this?" "Very," this person said in reply, and was correct. Super Amazing Wagon Time Adventure Game Turbo is a retro-graphics side-scrolling shooter starring a covered wagon heading west, three people you can name after your best friends, worst enemies, pets, or politicians, and a mixture of random and scripted events that will have you laughing.

Unless you're in one of the handful of on-foot sequences, you're shooting wildlife and bandits as you race your wagon across plains, mountain passes, and deserts. You'll pick up limited-ammo weapon powerups such as shotguns, airstrikes, and magic wands and possibly trade your trusty pistol for a magic sword or a trained falcon you find in an underwater treasure chest. You'll choose between fording a river and leaping it, in a decision that could lead you to fighting a satellite in low earth orbit or fighting off angry bears.

And you will kill buffalo. You will slaughter your way through a horde of buffalo so thick you will never want to see another. You will fight buffalo en masse. You will fight them in the sky. You will fight them on fire. You will hate these lumbering, flaming beasts that mercilessly ram your wagon to shreds and innocently traipse through your entrails. Even more than the bandits who choose to shoot at you, you will hate buffalo.

Play unlocks survival modes that let you dodge snakes, murder piranha, and fight off zombies. You can play an infinite travel mode. You can unlock unique wagons, each with their own special weapons (offering great and interesting choices for gameplay). But there is no mode that lets you get your vengeance on the hateful buffalo that now haunt my dreams.

Thanks, Super Amazing Double Wagon Time Adventure Game Turbo Ultra. I am a broken man.

Super Amazing Buffalo Murder Wagon Adventure is available for $2.99 on Steam, from Desura, or from solo developer sparsevector directly.