Inside: Rue Valley demo, Blue Prince, LOVE, Infinifactory, Mewgenics.
Rue Valley Demo
Detective/Walking Sim?
This was recommended to me as being similar to Disco Elysium. It is, but unfortunately it chooses to execute the “you are a pathetic loser” angle by completely taking away your ability to make decisions instead of by allowing you to make interestingly stupid decisions. Maybe it gets more interesting in the full version, but the demo is just a railroad forcing you to do extremely boring things while dangling interesting options in front of you that it doesn’t allow you to take. Yes, I get that it’s supposed to represent how the protagonist is depressed, but that doesn’t change the fact it’s boring to play. If the goal of the demo was to entice me to try the full game, it failed at that.
Blue Prince
Puzzle/Roguelike
An interesting experiment, but one that I don’t think worked very well. You are tasked with exploring a mansion of 9×5 rooms, and every time you open a door you can choose one of 3 randomly selected rooms to place in the next square. Each of these rooms contain some resource, clue, or other benefit that will help you explore the mansion further and uncover its secrets. In other words, it’s a roguelike puzzle game. The problem is that this combination just doesn’t produce satisfying gameplay, at least for me. Even once you figure out what you’re supposed to do, there’s a frustrating lag time where you have to wait for the luck of the draw in order to actually do it. It feels akin to those physics puzzlers where you can know the solution but still waste time fiddling with the annoying execution.
There are also a ton of puzzles whose clues at first appear to be background elements you’re unlikely to notice or write down, which leads to situations where you’ll encounter a puzzle and realize the clue is in another room you only half-remember, requiring you to backtrack to that room to write down the clue and then walk all the way back to the puzzle room again in order to actually use it. That would be tolerable if this were a normal puzzle game where you always have access to all the rooms, but the random generation potentially requires another lucky draw for every single one of those steps, which just drags everything out so painfully and unnecessarily. (There is also a mechanic where you can only walk through a limited number of rooms per run, so even if you managed to roll both rooms you could run out of steps on the return trip.)
I managed to get lucky and finish the game pretty quickly, but then it’s revealed that was only half the game and there are a ton more puzzles. I wouldn’t mind that in a regular puzzle game, but here… it’s just exhausting. I kept playing for a while after that, but once I figured out the more accessible ones I had no desire to keep rolling the dice on asinine time-wasters like “Trigger a specific Labratory experiment 36 times.” YouTube exists and that’s how I’ll view the remainder, thanks.
Also, it’s annoying that the blank slate protagonist has to be a boy. (There’s also some monarchist garbage if you dig into the deep lore. Why does everyone always have to be secret royalty?)
LOVE
Precision Platformer
A precision platformer that fixes my biggest gripe with precision platformers: checkpoint starvation. The gimmick of this game is that you can place a checkpoint anywhere, which is something I’ve always wanted to be able to do in frustrating platformers. It’s short but satisfying, and there’s a limited lives mode if you still want to be a masochist.
Infinifactory
Puzzle
This is a 3D Zachtronics game. If you’re unfamiliar with Zachtronics games, they’re essentially games about designing assembly lines: Every level provides you with raw materials, and you have to rearrange and combine them into the desired product using automated machinery. I’ve played a few of these in the past but they never quite clicked for me, mainly because there are a lot of real-life technologies (such as switchable tracks) that the game denies you seemingly just to make things harder, which frustrated me. Given my general distrust of games that jump from 2D to 3D, I wasn’t expecting this game to win me over.
To my surprise, I actually enjoyed it enough to finish it. (Well, almost — the final level set was the first time I had to look up a solution and when I saw what it required I noped out.) The puzzles are really engaging and make good use of 3D space. I think this is a rare case where 3D does significantly improve the gameplay: A big problem I had in the 2D games was how quickly I ran out of space, but 3D gives you so much more to work with. The game reminded me a lot of the engineering problems I took in college, to the point I think it might even be an effective educational tool. I definitely recommend it if any of that sounds appealing to you.
Mewgenics
Strategy RPG/Roguelike
A roguelike where you play as cats. I think it threads the needle of procedurally generated tactical gameplay better than Together in Battle, but commits the same sin as Darkest Dungeon II of making its boss design at odds with replayability. While the bosses aren’t as maliciously unfair as DD2’s (for the most part — Dreadnoughtus is hell if you didn’t bring a DPS party), they are still puzzle bosses who you will generally always fight the same way, and who are clearly designed to be fought with certain classes over others. This design philosophy clashes really badly with the way difficulty levels are implemented: On higher difficulties, bosses and certain enemies get a random buff that can range from higher damage to debuff immunity and much more. The randomness of the buff works fine for regular enemies, but for bosses, some buffs are trivial and some completely break the gimmick they’re based around. As an example: There’s an early boss whose gimmick is that he moves towards whatever damaged him and deals damage to whatever he contacts; clearly designed to punish melee attackers. He can roll with a buff that repels all attackers, which is meant to be a downside but actually allows melee attackers to completely ignore his gimmick, since they’re pushed out of the way before he can trample them. On the flipside, there’s a late-game boss who can only be hurt for a brief window, and to enable this the game stuns him to give you a free turn to attack; but he can roll with a stun immunity buff, which negates that free turn and makes the battle borderline unwinnable. This is baffling design that, frankly, makes it look like the higher difficulties were not playtested.
The classes themselves are not remotely balanced either. They can all end up with really busted combos if you luck into them (which is where most of the fun comes from), but some are much more consistently useful than others. Summoner builds, as per usual, completely break the game by inflating your action economy and giving you disposable cannon fodder to waste enemies’ attacks. I often felt like if I wasn’t bringing a druid or hunter, I was deliberately handicapping myself.
Aesthetically the game is very good, though. The designs are cute and the absurdity of enemies all being types of cats is hilarious. Everything plays into the silliness of the premise really well, I felt. The music is also excellent; every area uses the same melody with different remixes for the map, events, battles, and boss battles, which I thought worked really well and maintained a feeling of flow and momentum as you rapidly switch between those states. The boss remixes also add lyrics, which is a fun twist and often adds characterization to the area or the boss; every time I got to a new area, I was excited to reach the end to learn the lyrics to the song I’d been listening to the whole time.
However, given this is an Edmund McMillen game, there is also a lot of edginess and grossout humor, which I have more mixed feelings about. The game has the same issue I identified in Rogue Legacy: cats can develop real-world physical and psychological disorders that have concrete gameplay effects, which is obviously, uh, fraught. As one example, cats with Down’s Syndrome bottom out their intelligence stat (with the tradeoff of a massive charisma boost, for some reason). I think it’s generally better than Rogue Legacy (in particular, I think the ADHD effect — if you don’t give an order within 5 seconds the cat acts on its own — is a lot better than “ADHD makes you go fast lol”), but if you’re highly sensitive to ableism it’s still going to be upsetting. Apparently the creators did crowdsource disorders’ effects from people who actually had the disorders in question, which is a good move in theory but runs into the problem that the disabled community is not a hive mind, and what some disabled people find funny others will find really uncomfortable. For my part, I do like the effects of autism (+INT -CHA and makes your starting spells cost less mana but all other spells cost more mana), but again, I don’t speak for all autistic people.