Tread on Me

"Comeoncomeoncomeonnnnnn," said the tile, "step on me. C'mon!" The bathroom door swung open and someone walked in, missing the tile by one-fifth of a tilewidth. "Maaaaaaan," the tile said.

"Don't worry, 54," said nearby 73. "I'm sure you'll get stepped on soon. No reason to worry about it."

"I know, I know, but this is my ten-thousandth time. It's big!"

"Ohhh," said 73, "you'll be in the ten-kay club."

"Right!" cried 54. "And maybe, you know," it stopped.

"Maybe...?"

"Maybe when I'm in the ten-kay, 211 will be interested in me."

"Ohh, 211? Man, 211 is hot. Ho-o-o-ot."

"I know, right?"

"But totally attached to 240."

"Yeah, I know. And why wouldn't it be? 240 is totally awesome. 240 gets stepped on, like, all the time."

"And it's so nice about it, too."

As if on cue, 240 yelled across the floor. "Hey 54! Just heard about your near miss. No worries, man, you'll hit ten-kay any time now. You're awesome, bud!"

"See?" said 73. "Who wouldn't want to get next to a tile like that?"

"What's so great about getting stepped on," growled 1 from behind the propped-open bathroom door.

"Nothing, 1," said 54, "you just don't get it."

Unpleasantly of Cucumber

Her glass of water tasted unpleasantly of cucumber. In the end, that was what pushed her over the edge. Sitting in the judge's chambers, kept waiting for hours just to see an officious appointed individual who unreasonably had some say over how she used her home. The blast shattered the windows into shards, the largest smaller than a grain of sand, and demolished the heavy oak door. Splinters flew into the marble courthouse hall outside. Alarms rang throughout the building.

Security skidded to a stop in front of the ruins of the door and found her sitting comfortably in the judge's office, a small smirk on her face. Everything around her was crushed, shredded, pulverized, or generally annihilated.

"What happened?" cried one guard. "Ma'am, are you all right?" asked another.

"I'm fine," she said, languid. "But perhaps I shan't wait for the judge any longer."

She strode out of the hall, ignoring the guards' entreaties to wait, to see a doctor, to answer some questions. She passed the judge, who breathlessly wondered, "What happened to my office?"

"In the future," she said in passing, I recommend you not tell a wizard that she may not zone her home for magic."

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.

Escape from the Lost City

It burst from the wall of the crypt without warning, a venomous-green thing shining with a searing light that filled the chamber with angled shadows. A moment after it appeared it knocked Justine across the room. Her head hit the wall, and as the room went black she watched the monster advancing on Yesmin. When she opened her eyes, Yesmin was pulling her out of the crypt. The chamber where the demon had ambushed them was bright with red and green, blood human and otherworldly mixed in garish abstraction.

"J- j- j--" stuttered Yesmin.

"Justine," said Justine. Yesmin nodded. She shook her head and stumbled, and Justine noticed cuts, some still bleeding, all over her partner. She found her feet and started leading Yesmin through the streets of the abandoned city. "This way," she said. "How did you kill it?"

"Didn't," said Yesmin. "Couldn't. Had to get out." She stopped and doubled over against a wall.

"You did great," said Justine. "I can't believe you held it off long enough to get me out."

"Didn't," she said. "Couldn't. Had to get out." She retched, and her open mouth cast a burning green light on the street of the old city.

Murderers Anonymous

I checked that my face was covered, then stepped up to the lectern. "Remember that this is a safe place. Don't judge, because everyone here is trying. Who wants to speak first?" The first person up was fully covered with the robe and hood, but I recognized his tennis shoes from previous weeks. "My name is Mike," he mumbled, "and I'm a murderer."

"Hi, Mike," we chorused.

"I still remember when I lost control. He was just a kid, fourteen or fifteen, and I was older and so cool." We'd all heard the story before, but when he sat down, the front of his hood was damp.

"Thanks, Mike," I said. "Who wants to follow him?"

The person who replaced him had a reedy, grandmother's voice. "My name is Agnes," she said, "and I'm a murderer."

"Hi, Agnes," said the chorus.

"I'm afraid I fell off the wagon this week." I rolled my eyes. She falls off the wagon every week. "I took my rifle down to the park, picked out some man and shot him." She paused. "I'll try to do better next week," she said quietly, and then sat down.

Some of us are trying harder than others.

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.

The Humane Thing

Death sits over a book, leaning into it as though hanging on a great speaker's every word. Every other minute after silent minute, Death turns a page, scrabbling with its bony finger for a grip on the paper. Occasionally, it brings its hand up to its mouth as though it might lick the phalanges with an absent tongue before turning the next page. Near the end of the book, a whisper slips from between the Reaper's teeth, like the last hissing breath of a dozen dying folk. Someone close enough to Death, close enough to be quite reasonably nervous, might think the whisper sounds a little like the words, "Oh, no."

"No, really?" it breathes again, and it turns the pages faster until it reaches the end. "I can't believe he did it," Death says. "It makes sense, but still... wow."

Death reaches for the next book in the series. Later whispers sound more like, "Really?" and "Oh, but... why?" along with, "God, he kills more people than I do."

In the end, Death took George R.R. Martin before he could finish the series. In a one-of-a-kind press conference, Death stated, "It seemed like the humane thing to do."