Baba is You (2019)

July 28, 2020July 28, 2020 / stephensopinions / Leave a comment

It is a rare occasion in which I get to play a truly innovative game. Games that push the boundaries of a unique concept can be difficult to come by. That is why I was excited to try the acclaimed puzzle game Baba is You. This indie game presents an elegant idea: rules are meant to be broken. This is a game about rules, and how you can manipulate them to reach your goal.

Like many puzzle games, the premise of Baba is You is to get to the goal. The genius of the game is that the rules are ever changing. Each level is a square grid, and each rule is simply laid out for the player. It starts innocuous enough; the first level begins with rules such as “flag is win”, “Baba is you”, and “wall is stop”. You are a little white creature called Baba, you must make your win to the flag to win, and any wall in your way will stop you. What makes this game special is that the player can manipulate the rules as each word is movable. For example, you can push the word “wall” to break up the sentence “wall is stop”. Now that rule no longer exists, and you can freely walk through walls. Moreover, you can use whatever words are given to you to form new rules. In the previous example, you could use the given words to make “wall is win” to change the win condition of the level.

The idea behind Baba is You is absolutely phenomenal. In every game that I have played, rules are concrete. Through tutorials, text, or simple trial and error the player must deduce the mechanics of the game and how everything interacts. In Baba is You, every level has its own ruleset laid out in plain sight. It’s up to the player to manipulate those rules to their advantage. Breaking up sentences to invalidate troublesome barriers, or forming new rules that could prove useful. As the game progresses, new words begin appearing that could drastically change how levels need to be approached. Part of the beauty of the game is that despite the ever-changing rules, the win condition always remains the same: whatever object is “you” needs to be touching whatever is “win”. This inevitable end-state of any puzzle is a helpful starting point to begin thinking about how you can achieve victory.

The most critical aspect to any puzzle game is its level design. Challenges must be creative and fully utilize the games mechanics, while at the same time having relatively simple solutions that are not obtuse. If you’ve played many puzzle games, I’m sure that you’ve run into a roadblock and after finally stumbling into the solution you say “how the hell was I supposed to figure that out”. Designers must avoid this feeling while simultaneously crafting puzzles that force you to think. Baba is You has fantastic level design. Most solutions are simple to execute and don’t require some obscure mechanic. The designs are ingenious in that most levels require some trick or tactic that any other level hadn’t utilized yet, but remain simple and seem obvious once you discover the solution.

Moreover, Baba is You utilizes its unique premise to challenge preconceived notions. Most gamers are going to have internal habits that are going to be broken. You are going to make false assumptions about how to beat a level, and the developer was fully aware of that. Many of the levels have this uncanny quality to exploit the player’s desire to immediately attempt an obvious solution. It baits you into using an object the same way that you’ve used it so many times before, but that assumption will only lead you away from the goal. Many times, you feel so close to solving a puzzle, but in reality, you are so far off from the correct solution.

Additionally, for a game that is all about breaking rules Baba is You is remarkably good at stopping unintentional or “cheese” solutions from working. Again, it felt like the developer thought of every way a person could attempt to solve a level and prevented everything but the intended solution from working. The final note on level design that I want to touch on is the ability for each level to foster an “aha!” moment. It’s a great feeling when you figure out some trick that you hadn’t thought of before that makes the puzzle a breeze. Baba is You excels at creating those sensations when a level finally clicks.

One of the most important aspects to Baba is You is how relatively easy it is to get into. Some of my favorite puzzle games are notoriously unapproachable. Stephen’s Sausage Roll and SHENZHEN I/O are both confusing and cumbersome for new players, and as a result many people don’t give the games a fair chance. Baba is You is comparably simple to pick up and play. The game starts with extremely easy levels for the player to grasp the basics. Moreover, while there are over 200 individual levels, you only need to complete a few dozen to beat the game. You can pick and choose which levels you want to do, so if you get stuck on one particularly troublesome puzzle, you can skip it entirely and try something else.

Despite Baba is You being easy to pick up, it can be an extremely challenging game. While the beginning sections of the game are there to ease new players in, there is plenty of optional content that will test even the most veteran puzzler. The final few sections of the game in particular are insane. These parts are entirely optional, but they utilize a rapidly expanding ruleset and rely on meta solutions. How you complete one puzzle may affect another puzzle, and how to get to the next puzzle is dependent on how you completed a previous puzzle. I don’t want explain too much, as it may ruin the surprise for people who do want to experience these sections. It suffices to say that Baba is You truly maximizes the potential of its concept and it boasts plenty of difficult content.

My single point of contention with Baba is You comes from the moments where a level truly stumps the player. Baba is You relies on players to experiment with the rules on their own, nothing is explained outright. It is up to the player to figure out how each rule and object interacts. For the most part, this is a good thing. It respects the player’s intelligence and rewards creative use of rule manipulation. It also fosters those “aha” moments I spoke of before. The problem arises in that it can be a common occurrence where a puzzle completely stumps the player.

The issue is that nearly every single level in the game relies on some trick to complete it. Once you figure out the trick, the level seems elegant and simple. But if you haven’t figured it out then the puzzle is quite literally impossible. In other puzzle games, there is usually a series of moves or steps to get to the goal; you can make intermittent progress towards the finish as you figure out each individual step. Baba is You on the other hand relies on grand revelations and “aha” moments, so it may so happen that you stare at a puzzle for an hour and have made no progress. While these moments are frustrating, I do have to commend the game for providing a way to avoid this. As previously mentioned, you don’t have to complete every puzzle to beat the game. If one is stumping you, you can avoid it entirely. While I did end up 100% completing every puzzle in the game, any moment of frustration was self-inflicted because the game provides the option to circumvent any particularly tricky levels.

Something about Baba is You clicked for me in a way no other puzzle game has. It has a truly remarkable premise and incredibly designed logic-based puzzles. In a way, it reminds me of the enjoyable side of programming. Logically stringing together rules and statements to solve some problem is inherently satisfying to me. It is for these reasons that I give Baba is You a 10/10. I highly recommend this game for anybody who enjoys puzzles as it may be the best puzzle game ever made.

Feudal Alloy (2019)

July 21, 2020 / stephensopinions / 1 Comment

I’ve discussed a decent amount of indie metroidvanias since starting this website. It’s not surprising considering how many of these kinds of games are made. It stands to reason that new games in this niche must do something special to stand out, or risk being forgotten in an oversaturated market. Feudal Alloy looked promising to me, it had an interesting concept and setting, and I had hoped that it would do enough to at least be a decent metroidvania. Unfortunately, this game feels unfinished in every regard. Every aspect of the game could use polishing, and some components are missing entirely.

The idea behind Feudal Alloy is undoubtedly intriguing: you play as Attu, a fish-controlled robot in a medieval world. Attu was a resident of a farming town that produces oil for all of the robots, but a dastardly group of bandit robots ransacked the village and stole all of the resources. With sword in hand, Attu sets off on a quest to reclaim what was stolen. As a metroidvania you must progress through a sprawling world, collecting upgrades that allow you to progress further and further. Without a doubt, the best aspect of Feudal Alloy is its art style. The hand drawn characters and environments are appropriately detailed and are imaginative. It pains me to say that the positive aspects of Feudal Alloy end there.

Like most metroidvanias, as you roam the tunnels and rooms of the expansive map, you will run into enemies. The combat is pretty standard, you can swing your sword to damage foes, and you must avoid damage by jumping or moving out of the way. You eventually unlock some additional techniques such as dashing, the ability to throw bombs, blocking, and unleashing electrical discharges to stun enemies. The game at least has a thematic stamina system, as you use Attu’s various abilities he will begin to overheat. If Attu reaches his heat limit, he will no longer be able to attack or dash, and will need to cool off before continuing. It functions as most stamina systems, but it was a nice touch that it thematically fit the game.

The combat is all pretty typical, there is not much here that stands out from any other game. If anything, it can fill a bit stiff and unreliable at times. The hitboxes of Attu and enemies feel a little inconsistent. While it’s not frustratingly bad, the game is definitely lacking the buttery-smoothness of one if its peers: Hollow Knight. The aerial combat in particular is pretty clunky. Jumping above enemies and slashing them from above does not bounce Attu high enough, so you end up just falling straight into the enemy and taking damage. The biggest disappointment in the combat department is its lack of bosses. There are only two bosses in the entire game. Instead, there are an abundance of challenge rooms which bombard the player with wave after wave of normal enemies. These kinds of rooms are fine once in a while, but they felt like filler for where a unique boss should have been. It definitely seems like there were supposed to be more bosses, but the developers just put these challenge rooms in their place to save time.

As a metroidvania, exploration is a key aspect of Feudal Alloy. The player must figure out where to go, and what new paths can be traversed when an upgrade is found. Similar to the combat, Feudal Alloy follows a pretty standard exploration formula but with some flaws. The environments are pretty similar looking, and landmarks are essentially non-existent. It can be difficult to remember any important locations and how to get there since everything just blends together visually. Moreover, some parts of the map just don’t make geometric sense. It’s hard to explain, but when looking at the map, rooms just don’t line up with where the doors physically are. For example, the map will show a door on the left side of the room, but in reality, the door is on the floor. These inconsistencies can make navigation difficult.

The other big problem that I had with the exploration was the lack of proper secrets. Sure, there are a ton of hidden paths and secrets to find, but not a single one of them is rewarding in the slightest. Most of them contain a stash of money, but money is virtually worthless. The only other prize you could find is a new piece of gear to equip, but that rarely felt helpful. You can buy health potions and coolant to restore stamina with the money you find, but these are extremely cheap and I never worried about running out of money. You could also buy new equipment, but the realistically there was little reason to ever do so.

New gear in Feudal Alloy feels relatively useless. There are five stats: damage, armor, cooling speed, overheat temperature, and health. Armor and health are essentially the same as they both increase how much damage you can take. Similarly, cooling speed and overheat temperature also are functionally comparable. You can’t even tell what your stats are really doing. There’s no way to tell how much damage your dealing or taking, so it’s hard to judge how much a stat increase is doing for you. Moreover, finding or buying new gear rarely feels rewarding. All it does is slightly swap around which stats it gives you. One chest piece may give you one less damage tick, but one more health tick. I didn’t feel like there was meaningful equipment parity or choice since everything was so similar.

My final gripe about the game was how it underutilized its story and setting. The couple sentences that I wrote to describe the basis of the story is all that there is in the game. I’m not exaggerating when I say there is a short blurb at the beginning of the game explaining the story, and that’s the extent of the narrative in the game. There are no additional characters, lore, side quests, or even a narrative arc that progresses through the game. Bandits stole the oil and Attu is trying to get it back. That’s it. It’s really disappointing because the setting is actually fairly interesting. I want to know more about the fish-controlled robots, but there is just no worldbuilding of any sort.

Overall, Feudal Alloy isn’t a particularly bad game, it’s just not finished. The combat needs fine tuning and there needs to be more bosses. Exploration needs to feel more rewarding, and one way to accomplish that would be to make gear more unique. The environments need to be more distinct so that navigation is more natural. And there needs to be some sort of story, worldbuilding, and lore to utilize the unique setting of the game. It is for these reasons that I give Feudal Alloy a 4/10. This is a game that feels like it is still in the alpha stages of development, as nearly every aspect feels unfinished and unpolished.

Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX (2020)

July 20, 2020July 20, 2020 / stephensopinions / Leave a comment

As a kid, Pokémon was undoubtedly my favorite franchise. I played through all of the games dozens of times, I watched the TV show, I had trading cards and toys, I loved everything Pokémon. When Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team came out in 2005, I happily played it despite it being a spin-off with little resemblance to the main games. This rogue-lite dungeon crawler with a Pokémon skin remained a fond memory of mine, so when it was announced it was getting a remake in 2020, I was ecstatic to revisit it. The main concern I had for the game was whether its gameplay would still be enjoyable so many years later. Spoiler alert: it isn’t.

What I wasn’t worried about was the game’s sense of charm. I bought the game during my final semester of college, with many projects and final exams looming, and in the height of the COVID-19 lock-down. It suffices to say that I was looking for a relaxing and wholesome game during these stressful times. Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX has charm in spades. The premise of the game is that you play as a Pokémon, teaming up with some Poké-pals to rescue others who are in trouble. You form a rescue team in a small village, undertaking missions to help others and raise your reputation. The music, visuals, and the wholesome nature of the game does an excellent job at establishing the comforting environment that I was looking for.

The main issue that I had with Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX is not really the game’s fault. It’s a remake of a 2005 game, and as such it must emulate the core mechanics of the original. The thing is, the gameplay of the original game was an outdated formula back when it was released fifteen years ago. In 2020, a dungeon crawler of this nature is outdone by its peers. In Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX, you enter randomly generated dungeons, exploring each floor, and progressing deeper and deeper until you reach your goal. There are items to pick up, adversarial Pokémon to battle, helpless inhabitants to rescue, and even a few bosses to fight. The game is played on a square grid, and is turn based. When you move a space forward, so do all of the other Pokémon that happen to be in the dungeon.

When an opposing Pokémon gets in your way, you can take it down with whatever moves that you and your party have at your disposal. There is a small chance that defeating an enemy will inspire them to join your cause. As a dungeon crawler, you proceed floor by floor, searching for the next staircase to progress. Inventory management plays a crucial role as you must keep an ample supply of food, healing items, and other trinkets that may assist on your journey. The problem with all of this is that the game is completely brainless. You can completely zone out, just walk through the dungeon searching for the next floor, and whenever you encounter an enemy you just pick the best move to dispatch of them as soon as possible. There is very little strategy, planning, skill, or nuance of any sort.

I understand that the Pokémon series is meant to be accessible by everyone, including little kids. But there is a difference between an easy game and a repetitive grind. Unfortunately, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX is the latter. Every mission plays out the exact same way, and there is very little the player can do to spice things up. You can switch party members out, but for all of the story missions you need to keep two out of your three party slots as the main characters. It doesn’t allow for a lot of freedom when team-building. Moreover, there is not a great sense of progression either. You cannot even evolve until the post-game, so it doesn’t feel like there is a concrete goal to work towards. After a couple of ventures into a dungeon, I started to feel the tedium of the game set in.

The one exception to the repetitive and overly simple aspect of the game is the post-game content, which there is plenty of. The dungeons and quests after you complete the main story are slightly more challenging, and actually encourage building specific teams to take on certain dungeons and bosses. There is at least some element of strategic planning here. But it comes too little too late, as I was tired of the game’s repetitive formula by the time I had completed the main story.

On the bright side, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX is at least a faithful remake of the original game. Other than a few minor changes, this game replicates the original experience, as a remake should. The new painterly art style is phenomenal, it exudes a warm feeling, perfect for the cozy atmosphere of the game. Another change was that the IQ system was reworked into a simpler system in which each Pokémon has a “rare quality” that has some significant effect on the party as a whole. I think this was a positive change, as I remember the IQ system being fairly confusing, but that could just because I played the original game when I was a little kid.

The final new change is that the player can now recruit more Pokémon in each dungeon if they are fortunate enough. You can still only bring three members into each dungeon, but now you can have a party of up to size eight if you were to recruit five additional Pokémon while traversing the dungeon. In the original game you could only recruit one additional Pokémon per dungeon, so this definitely makes collecting new allies a simpler affair. The downside here is that having too many allies can trivialize dungeons and boss fights. It’s already an easy game, and it only becomes easier when you have twice the party members that you were originally intended to have. Instead of allowing you to have eight members in a party, I wish you could simply recruit new Pokémon without them being a member of the party immediately. This would keep the benefit of being able to recruit new team members beyond the one additional Pokémon per dungeon, but also avoid trivializing the entire game.

Overall, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX is a victim of its origins. It’s a fine remake, but the game that it remade just doesn’t hold up very well. The game is cute, charming, and wholesome, but it’s impossible to ignore the outdated gameplay. A niche audience may still enjoy the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games, but I found the game to be incredibly tedious and repetitive. It is for these reasons I give Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX a 5/10. Sometimes it’s better to let nostalgic games remain a fond memory.

Astral Chain (2019)

July 15, 2020July 15, 2020 / stephensopinions / Leave a comment

I have never been particularly good at action games which rely on combo-heavy gameplay. While I may enjoy them to an extent, I usually fall back on bread and butter combos, never utilizing the full potential of the games. When I first learned of Astral Chain, I was excited at the prospect of an action game that deemphasized combos, and instead was geared towards positioning and strategic use of combat options. Astral Chain is unique in that you are essentially controlling two characters at once: the main character and their metallic companion. This concept had a lot of promise, and I was excited for an action game that I could really master. Unfortunately, my time with the Astral Chain did not pan out so well, and I was ultimately disappointed by the game’s shortcomings.

The idea behind Astral Chain is that you play as a futuristic police officer in a decaying world. The world is being corrupted by some extradimensional being, and you are assigned to a special task force to defend the last city on Earth from the spreading corruption. You are equipped with a captured entity from the other dimension, chained and tamed so that you can utilize its abilities against its own brethren. You control both the main character and this being, called a legion. By holding down on one of the gamepad triggers, you can move the legion and use any abilities related to it. If you are not holding the trigger, you are controlling the main character, and the legion will attack the nearest enemy automatically. Most of the time you can simply let the legion do its own thing while only you focus on piloting the main character.

What drew me into Astral Chain was how strategic the combat seemed at a glance. There are five separate legions that you will acquire throughout the course of the game. Each has a panoply of special abilities, and as such some are better suited for certain enemy archetypes. On top of this the actual chain connecting the player and the legion is a physical entity that has consequences on the battlefield. You can use it as a trip wire to stop charging foes, or you can use it tie up and immobilize enemies, or you can use it to have the human dash to the legion or vice versa. All of this is great, there are tons of ways to mix up combat and come up with your own style. Utilizing all of the legion’s abilities, using the chain itself, and positioning the legion and main character simultaneously makes for a hectic but fun combat system. There’s no need to memorize long strings of button inputs to pull off a combo, instead you improvise your own methods of operating the legion.

While I love that the combat is unique and lets players develop their own styles, it also has quite a few issues. The most glaring and common issue in the combat is the camera. It can often be difficult to tell what is going on due to the fact that it can be finicky to position the camera well. This is exacerbated by the fact that for some reason many of the arenas are extremely cramped. Moreover, there are big, flashy animations that obscure what is happening.

One of the more bizarre problems with the combat was how the dodge functioned. In most games, dodging provides the player with invincibility frames, so you could dodge through attacks if timed properly. Astral Chain functions similarly, except there is a noticeable lack of invincibility frames. This is fine for the quicker attacks, since the player still can properly avoid them with well-timed dodges. But for longer, lingering attacks such as spinning slashes or shockwaves, the dodge is not sufficient. You could dodge the attack, but get hit by a lingering hitbox and take damage regardless of how well you timed your dodge. I think the idea behind this was to force the player to focus on properly spacing and moving far away from enemies when they use these kinds of attacks, but many times combat is so chaotic you cannot possibly tell if they are going to do a spinning attack or regular slash.

Astral Chain isn’t a particularly long game, there are around a dozen “chapters” to complete. This is fine, except for the fact that the first couple chapters of the game are essentially elongated tutorials. One of the most crucial mechanics in the game, sync attacking, is not even unlocked until the third chapter. Spending such a significant portion of a game in tutorial-town is something that I always abhor in games. I somewhat understand it, since Astral Chain has a ton of buttons and intricacies. However, the first chapters are extremely boring and a poor introduction to the game. The combat in these beginning sections is just mashing the attack button and dodging when appropriate. The legion gets very little use. Considering the legion is such a crucial aspect of the game, I would have like for these chapters to have introduced the core mechanics of the legion earlier on.

The action portion of Astral Chain is certainly unique and it can be a blast, but it is held back by some of the nagging issues I mentioned. Unfortunately, the rest of the game is far less redeemable. The setting itself is interesting, and the art style is sharp and vibrant. Other than that, I found the non-action parts of Astral Chain to be painful. The voice acting was somewhat stiff, but perhaps that was because the script was so poor. The main character doesn’t talk at all, and their twin is an unlikeable jerk throughout the course of the game. The dialogue just doesn’t feel natural in the slightest. This isn’t helped by the fact that the story itself was a big anime trope. That would be ok if the elaborate and crazy narrative ideas actually made sense. The villains are so poorly explained that their motives and ultimate goals remain a mystery even after beating the game.

The strongest part of Astral Chain is undeniably its combat. It’s strange then that the game puts so many roadblocks between combat encounters. A ludicrous amount of time is spent wandering around environments doing random tasks before you can actually get to the fun parts. The game often transports the player to the “astral plane” which is a different dimension in which most of the combat takes place. Unfortunately, between encounters the player is often left to explore, do light puzzle solving, or do the dreaded platforming sections. It feels like the developers had an idea in mind to put downtime between action sequences, but put zero effort into actually making the downtime anything but a chore.

The astral plane is so dull to look at, so exploring it grows tiresome quickly. The “puzzles” in the game generally consist of moving a block from point A to a highlighted point B. There are no obstructions are anything that could constitute an actual puzzle. And the platforming is downright frustrating. Your character cannot jump, and you must rely on dashing to the legion to make it across gaps. But where exactly your character will land is not obvious, so sometimes you just don’t dash far enough despite your legion being on a platform. Moreover, you can get stuck on the tiniest pieces of environment geometry and will instantly fall.

Outside of the astral plane, there are plenty of other time-wasting tasks to get in the way of fun. The stealth sections are absolutely unnecessary and unrefined for instance. Most of the game’s side quests are poorly tuned mini-games. Moving stacks of boxes using motion controls, chasing down petty criminals, and shooting balloons are ultimately not engaging tasks. The biggest culprit of being an underdeveloped time-sink are the investigations. At the beginning of each chapter, you generally must run around a crime scene to gather clues about some mysterious occurrence. Of course, there is no actual logic or deduction here. It’s just talking to various characters who give you highlighted clues, and then at the end you take a quiz by matching the clues to some questions. Maybe I was disappointed because I had just played the masterful deduction game Return of the Obra Dinn, but the investigations felt like they were slapped on during the end of development rather than being a fully fleshed out feature.

Overall, I did not enjoy my time with Astral Chain. It’s a game that I think spread itself too thin with many different ideas rather than focus on refining one or two. If the platforming, puzzling, stealth, exploration, and side quests were dropped entirely I think the game would be better off for it. Moreover, if time hadn’t been spent making these underdeveloped features, maybe more time could have been spent to refine the core aspects of the game. The combat was fun, but it definitely could’ve been fine tuned. The investigations needed a lot of work to be turned into a decent feature. If the game had been centered around combat and investigations, I think it could’ve been a more succinct experience rather than the mess that it is. It is for these reasons that I am giving Astral Chain a 4/10. There are much better action games out there, as this game is a muddled and unfocused collection of ideas.