Crashbook #29

12 thoughts on “Crashbook #29”

1. I always love your lists’ mix of under-the-radar titles I’m also interested in and ones that are totally new to me.

   I thought Hard Chip’s demo was pretty neat, and well-presented relative to the intimidating subject matter. Duskpunk I hadn’t heard of at all; it looks pleasantly similar to a steampunk Citizen Sleeper.

   (The Amberspire Steam link goes to Keep Driving’s page, btw).

2. Hmm I think there was an outage today because I didn’t get any emails for hours and I don’t think the subscriber email about this post went out either

   I’ve fixed the link, thanks! I knew I shouldn’t have moved the links around…

   I try my best to capture titles that I might not necessarily play but have something going for them. It would be very easy to just put down space station horror in each entry because I’m a sucker for that stuff… eg I don’t think that Stories from the Sol is my cup of tea at all, but it’s got some love poured into it.

3. Having seen two LPs of Threshold and at least one video doing a deep dive into it…

   It is interesting. It doesn’t stray far from all the other faux-PSX indie horror games but it’s just a bit more content, a bit more polish, a bit more cooked idea. It’s well liked for good reasons!

4. Because of your comment on Post Void this is on topic: I fired up Quadrant in class the other day to make a point about abstract games, and I got a game over in five seconds. Everyone laughed.

   For a little bit I have had kicking around in my mind something like Darkest Dungeon but peaceful: You accumulate people on your expedition, instead of losing hit points in combat you have various obstacles that can sap your will to continue, enough stress can change your personality in various ways… it looks like Keep Driving might kind of be it? Not that I’m going to find out!

5. Hot Wax has little excuse to be in the Crashbook, as it was originally a PICO-8 game and it’s still free, you can just try it out in the browser.
   https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=146729

6. THRESHOLD: been following the creator of this on the internets for quite a while. intrigued because he lists pathologic 2 as one of his key influences for this game. been avoiding any more details about it for the time being, since money to buy games is pretty short.

   STRAND: tried the demo the day before yesterday. was pretty unimpressed. the writing felt clunky, puzzle design remedial, and there was way too much mousing over everything in the environment to see what could be interacted with and what couldnt—even signifiers like a handle on drawer or wall panel are unreliable indications of interactivity. and even on lowest settings, the framerate on my pc was terrible.

   Knights in Tight Spaces: tried the demo yesterday. i was a huge fan of Fights in Tight Spaces. this keeps the same core mechanics of that, but adds in character classes, additional party members, equippable weapons, magic spells. adds a lot of *stuff*, but it all seems to bog down the fast and tight tactics that FiTS had. and the graphical style here is far busier, making the battlefield harder to read. felt to me like an uninspired knockoff of FiTS, with more stuff but not better.

   Skin Deep: ive been following this since Brendon Chung posted the first teaser video back in 2018 or 2019 or whenever that was. the demo is janky and short but is oozing with Blendo style. still leaves me unsure what the full game will feel like to play (the demo level was really tiny and felt really too unconstrained for my liking), but money willing i will be picking it up on launch regardless.

   Blue Prince: tried the demo this morning. surprisingly compulsive.
   i ended up playing the demo through the three whole times that it permits (each consisting of 4 consecutive single-day runs) just so i could see a few more room types and figure out a few more puzzles. will probably try to pick it up.

7. I was meaning to reply to these comments while I was travelling for several hours by train over the weekend, but I was so tired, I literally put my head down and closed my eyes.

   Maurycy: Yes, I’d hear good things about Threshold. I’m looking forward to giving it a go one of these days.

   Matt W: You should also flaunt your skills in rhythm game Lofi Ping Pong, because I lasted even shorter than that on my first attempt. Also, was there a particular reason to cite Darkest Dungeon in your comment? I haven’t played so…

   salty-horse: Honestly, there’s not much difference between playing a free game and the hundreds of unplayed titles in my back catalogue 🙂 But thanks for pointing that out for the visiting crowd. I’d initially started off linking to Steam but the game is deliberately an itch exclusive in the short-term.

   vfig: Yeah, I’m gonna go do Threshold sooner or later, although I hope its not later. What you said about Strand jives with my impressions of the trailer; the voiceover really didn’t grab me and puzzles in these sorts of modern first-person adventures can be hit-and-miss. Takes me back to Claire de Lune which is ‘pretty’ and has some nice segments but there’s something hollow to it.

   Ah, shame about Knights in Tight Spaces. I looked at the screenshots and they definitely didn’t have the appeal of the clean FiTS aesthetics – a bit like following up Mirror’s Edge with ‘realistic’ brown levels of the modern FPS. I don’t imagine much will change there but I still hold out hope for KiTS on the mechanics front, that perhaps it’ll be more straightforward and obvious in a full release. Demos can be such a clusterfuck for developers.

   I guess the trailer for Skin Deep would make it a day one purchase for me, if I ever bought something on day one. (Well, I bought Talos 2 on day one, just to shake the notions from your head that I got a free copy from Devolver.)

   I’m staying clear of trying Blue Prince before release – all the praise for it seems good enough for me. Thanks y’all.

8. I was going to say “I can’t flaunt my skills in Lofi Ping Pong and you know why” but I was able to set it up in Wineskin. I was unable to last five seconds in “how do you get back to the game when it kicks you to the menu” mode. Also didn’t much like the game. Sometime I will post about what I like in rhythm games.

   Why Darkest Dungeon–maybe it just happened to be the one I was thinking of. And also a game that has line-up combat which I think would be more easily adaptable to “combat is conversation and hit points are your will to continue” and like that than the roguelike style where you bump into other characters (literally, as in letters) on a grid. Yeah, this is the RPG about getting out the vote that I’ve been on about for so long that it made sense to say “mana points are minutes on your burner cell phone that you use to call campaign HQ” and that I have never had the slightest intention of realizing.

   But I think the big thing is the Darkest Dungeon mechanic where when a character stresses out–the stress mechanic is already congenial to this–they face a test of character that leaves them with a character flaw or a virtue, with a nice animation. Which could be a great addition to this “RPG combat is trying to accomplish tasks in the face of frustration” game! Assuming that there’s a way to give it some kind of narrative payoff, because in DD the quirks are just really some kind of stat modifier or something. (This is not quite fair but nvm.) Of course the problem here is that making random stuff count for narrative is mindbogglingly difficult.

   Anyway Darkest Dungeon is <a href="https://www.electrondance.com/graveyard-of-puzzles/"<Graveyarded; I think I mentioned that I was playing it a bunch this summer and I expected to stop when the semester started and that is what happened. It is a long game–there is an achievement for completing it within 99 weeks which is not real time but 99 expeditions is still a lot–and long before the end I felt like I wasn’t getting new things. Partly it doesn’t have effective gating. You’re trying to raise a team to where it can take on the final quest, and the intermediate quests aren’t really “you are having a hard time but there is an item that will help you” but “get to a higher level and boost your stats and get enough stuff to boost your training facilities” or in short, grinding. I’m not bitter, I got what I felt like getting out of the game.

   My other game with wow! graphics and wimpled nuns, Inkulinati, is in stasis rather than the graveyard. Maybe sometime I’ll get back to trying to finish my final run! Or probably not final because I was likely to lose and it’s not like I’ll have improved at it in the n months I haven’t played. At least the permadeath aspects mean you aren’t grinding so much. What I’ve really been playing is this game called Legerdemain, which acts like a roguelike but isn’t one (it has fixed maps and no permadeath), and which is also long as heck, but where when you make progress you open up a new thing that looks different and also probably has different characters with dialogue. It sure is long though. I was getting help from the author at a point where I was stuck and he commented that most people hadn’t got that far, and I’m pretty sure I’m less than halfway through.

   Salty-horse: Because of your comment I have gotten kind of obsessed with the PICO version of hot wax. I did get over 30,000 on Wax Whisperer. And I got the demo of the real version and the available modes seem not as fun/infuriating? which might just be because higher difficulty levels are not in the demo.

9. It’s really hard to imagine that Keep Driving is by the Post Void folks. Post Void is so good, as twitchy and difficult as it is! I’ve played it and a couple of the offshoots like Mullet Mad Jack and Anger Foot, but Post Void is just so acidic and pure.

   I did play the very very slight demo for Threshold last year and it was super intriguing but not quite enough to get me on board for launch. Mouthwashing, however… Loved the demo for that and have since played through the full game. I wasn’t quite as taken by the complete thing as most folks appeared to be, but I appreciated its presentation, tone and Blendo-esque jump cuts. Speaking of Blendo…

   Skin Deep! Maaaan. The recent demo made me laugh and just squeak with excitement a lot! Quadrilateral Cowboy is one of my all-time favourites so I can’t wait for it.

   “now you’re absolutely selling it with the word “short”.”

   I felt that.

   So I didn’t get on with Fights In Tight Spaces, as much as I dearly wanted to, especially after that awful but conceptually and stylistically cool John Wick Hex game. I think what did it for me was the deck-building. I’m not that familiar with deck-building outside of Inscryption, but being in rough situations and the very specific cards you need not being dealt, or being dealt but too late was very frustrating! Now, Tactical Breach Wizards… that’s been my jam. I’d like to return to Tight Spaces and see if we just got off on the wrong foot.

   Blue Prince looks ace and is fun to describe. You don’t even have to say Metroidbrania. I did one day on the demo and uninstalled it convinced.

   Punkcake make games faster than I can play them. I’m intrigued by Horizons: The End Of Words and Smol Gods, which came out shortly after Hot Wax!

10. Ack, ‘brainia’. It really is the worst word.

11. so two weeks ago i wrote “i ended up playing the demo through the three whole times that it permits”. but i had already seen too much! since the demo doesnt let you delete profiles to keep exploring, i instead deleted its whole savegame folder so i could go again. and again. and again.

    i must have played through the four days well over 20 times by now. i am hooked. i have uncovered a whole pile of secrets already, but there are still many mysteries. i have a long list of notes of further hints and clues to things that dont appear to be present in the demo.

    so yeah, i think i just have to get the full game when it comes out, to clean up all these loose ends.

12. Oh my goodness I was so busy making Duskpunk that I missed the fact you featured it here! Thank you! ^-^