Downtime

  10/01/2025       St. Elmo's Fire      Add Comment

Sorry for the unexpected downtime; something was pinging the server an absurd number of times and used up our allocated bandwidth for the month. I suspect it was spambots, so I’ve shored up our anti-spam defenses. Hopefully things will be fine now.

Housekeeping

Cassette Beasts

  08/06/2025       St. Elmo's Fire      8 Comments

This is a Pokemon-like I’ve had my eye on since it released in 2023. I was on the fence about buying the full version after playing the demo, but I managed to snap it up for dirt cheap during the summer sale.

I found this game to be very similar to Disc Creatures: Lovely world, presentation, and creature design, but distressingly dull gameplay. The late game is barely any more complex than the battles featured in the demo. The whole thing feels more like a proof of concept than a finished game, which is a shame because it does have a lot of potential.

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   Monster Collector, RPGs, Video Games     

Backpack Hero

  07/19/2025       St. Elmo's Fire      Add Comment

This is a roguelike that makes a game out of inventory Tetris. Not only do you have limited inventory space, but items can affect each other based on their position within the backpack and relative to each other. For instance, helmets boost your defense for every row below them, and arrows gain attack power for every empty space to the right of them. I think this is a very neat idea, but unfortunately the actual game ended up rather half-baked.

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   Roguelike, RPGs, Video Games     

Rainbow Billy: The Curse of the Leviathan

  06/22/2025       St. Elmo's Fire      Add Comment

This is a cute kids’ game of the “experimenting with nonviolent gameplay” genre. It reminds me a lot of both UnderTale and my own Flawed Crystals. The overall structure is essentially, “What if when you spared enemies in UnderTale they joined your party?” A set of recruited enemies are drawn randomly from a deck in each round, and you can summon a certain number per turn. Outside of battle, you can level up your friendship through the standard video game relationship strategy of bribing them with gifts and food.

The plot is a standard Saturday-morning-cartoon-esque premise: An evil monster has drained all color from the world because he wants to remove the hero’s “rainbow heart” and make everything conform to normalcy. If that sounds like very queer subtext, you may be surprised to learn it is actually queer text; the protagonist is textually nonbinary, and many of the recruitable characters are gay or nonbinary and explicitly struggle with queerphobia. I’m pleased we have gotten to a point where kids’ media can discuss this stuff outright instead of needing to obfuscate everything behind metaphor and allegory.

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   Platformers, Recommendations, RPGs, Video Games     

Together in Battle

  06/13/2025       St. Elmo's Fire      4 Comments

Together in Battle is the latest entry in the Telepath RPG series and the followup to Telepath Tactics, which I reviewed… a decade ago, wow it’s been a while. In the intervening time I’ve gotten a lot more experience with tactical RPGs through binging the entire Fire Emblem franchise, so I have broader knowledge to compare it against.

Together in Battle is structured more like a roguelike: Characters, maps, and events are randomly generated except for a few story-related battles. To this end there is now a life sim aspect where you can only do a limited number of things per day, and your characters regularly drain food and money. I can see the reasoning in this — it makes sense to try something qualitatively different rather than just making Telepath Tactics again. Unfortunately, I don’t think it accomplished what it was going for nearly as well this time, and overall left me feeling oddly disappointed.

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   RPGs, Strategy, Telepath Series, Video Games