Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: indie games

What makes a game great (to me)

In yesterday’s post, I was talking about my two top five (six) list of games. One is my list of the FromSoft games and the other is my list of my five favorite other games of all time. I have to do it because otherwise my top five fave list would just be From games. I don’t have a problem with that, but it’s not respresentative of my interests over all.

What do I mean by that? I mean that while I adore the From games, I also really like indie games for very different reasons. I’ll be real. I don’t get that deep in my feels while playing From games. Don’t get me wrong. There are feelings there. Liking wanting to bonk this character or that. I kid, but I am also not kidding. There are many tragic stories in the games, and they are involved and in-depth. Layered, even. I have had feelings while experiencing the different NPC questlines, sure, but…

Is this heresy to say? It might be, but I don’t care. I’m just keeping it real.

In playing games, I have not gotten as deep in my feels as I did while playing at least three of the games on my non-From list. Night in the Woods (Infinite Fall); Spiritfarer (Thunder Lotus Games); and, Cozy Grove (Spry Fox). They are all special in different ways, but they have a thread that runs through all of them. Death.

I played the three games before my medical crisis (and some Cozy Grove after), and now, they mean so much more since I died (twice!). I have a completely different lens through which I look at life, and these games have stayed with me. I talked about Night in the Woods in yesterday’s post, and today, I want to talk about Spiritfarer.

What can I say about this game? First, it’s made by a dev that I had tried one of their prior games (or both. I can’t quite remember. Sundered and Jotun), and I did not like either. They have a new game that is played by up to 33(!) players at the same time–which is also so much not my jam. Howevwer, when I saw the trailer for Spiritfarer (which I’ll include below), I knew immediately that it was something special. The environments were hand-drawn, rich in color, and just so lovely. The music suited the game, being simultaneously ethereal and haunting,  and the characters were rich and complex.

I will say that I didn’t realize it was actually tagged as a platformer because that’s such a minor aspect of the game, and it’s the part I least-enjoyed. I won’t get into that, but the platforming at the end almost made me quit the game.

Anyway, the main character is a silent protagonist named Stella who is the titular spiritfarer. Her job is to take people to the Everdoor at the end of their lives.  As the player, I had to build up the boat on which I spent a lot of time making things. There’s a lot of plant growing, cooking, and other such activities on the boat.


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Balatro part three (I can’t quit it)

Am I making a third post about Balatro (LocalThunk)? Yup. Did I ragequit the game when getting what I considered to be an unfair final boss? Also yup! Did I go back the next day and win the next run? Yup for the third time!

Let’s talk about that loss. Before I do, here is my post from yesterday. For whatever reason, I didn’t actually finish it until just before starting this post–and then I ended it abruptly to write this one. Hey, it’s the holidays so I do what I want! I have to be careful, though, because if I don’t  follow a schedule, I tend to not do the thing at all (in this case, writing posts and writing 2,000 words of fiction/nonfiction a day).

Let’s talk about that loss. There are different bosses you can fight after a small blind round and a big blind round. The bosses all have one negative thing you have to overcome as I mentioned before. I’m not sure if the bosess are restricted to a pool in each round (like most roguelikes), but that’s definitnely the case with the final round. These are very special rounds, and I’m not fond of any of them. But the one that really just took the wind out of my sale was the

*SPOILER WARNING*

Violet Vessel. I keep wanting to call it Violet Assassin, and people online have called it Violent Vessel, which is also funny. The qualifier for this boss is a really big blind–in this case, 3 times the normal amount–which is 100,000. So, in this case, you have to get 300,000. Well, not dollars, but chips. I call it monies. 

I had been cruising along really easily in this run, barely breaking a sweat. Then, I hit the big boss, saw the requirement, and I just deflated. There was no way I was going to make 300,000–my deck was just not good enough for that. I tried, but my heart wasn’t in it. I managed to get 100,000+, but that was cold comfort when I had to get three times that amount.

I cursed and immedaitely quit out of the game. I vented about it in the RKG Discord Balatro channel and thought about not going back. That would actually be for the best because I am too into this game.

I went back, of course, and I won the next game. And now I’ve won a game on the next level. See, white stake is the base level. Red stake is what you get for winning one game. You can only play red stake with a deck that you have won once with. Red stake is that you get no chips for winning the small blind. Therefore, it’s better to skip it and get the reward instead. It’s oftentimes souped up joker at the end of the round (in the shop). Jokers will make and/or break you.


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More about Balatro

Let’s talk more about Balatro (LocalThunk) and indie games in general. Yesterday, I did A Quick Look at the game, and I have more to asy about it. It’s hard to describe to someone who hasn’t played it because you simply cannot capture the addictive nature of it in words. As I mentioned yesterday, just describing it to someone doesn’t tell yout the magic of the game.

“It’s a poker game that has qualifiers every run. It’s procedurally generated so you never know what condition you’re going to play under. Oh, and there are a ton of different kinds of cards.”

Before I get into that, I just played a bit more and won my first run. And then found out from the Balatro channel in the RKG Discord that you can order your jokers and your cards that you are playing. How? Well, ok.

*SPOILERS*

Here’s the thing. For every ‘boss’ hand (which is every third hand), there is some kind of negative effect. I mentioned this yesterday. Whether it’sa debuff of one suit of cards or you only get one hand or a dozen other debuffs, it’s always a stress. You can’t skip these hands, either, as you can the small blind and/or the big blind.

You get five jokers for each run. In this run, I just jacked up my multipliers. One joker had a 50 multiplier, which was tremendous. And, before the second-to-last-hand, I picked up the joker that will allow you to win a hand as long as you get a quarter amount of the chips (points) you needed by the end of the game. In this case, 100,000. So I only had to get 25,000.

But the last boss was called the Amber Acorn, and it shuffled and flipped over your jokers. I did not know what that meant exactly, and I was panicking at the idea of losing all my great multipliers  and the joker that would allow me to win with a quarter of the points. I posted about it in the channel, and someone helpfully pointed out that you could order your jokers to maximize the multipliers. The game did it from left to right, so you wanted any + multiplier before a x multiplier. It made sense once I heard it, but it juest never occurred to me. I joked in the channel that I wasn’t sure I could handle even more thinking in this game.

Ian said that it was obvious once you tried the game how smart it was. He’s right. You may not be able to tell the depths right away, but it’s all right there. It’s deceptively simple, too. Play poker, amass chips (points), use a bunch of different cards, and then win. Or lose. Lots of losing. Oh, by the way, I won legit. I got over 100,000 chips so I didn’t even need that specific joker–but I was glad to have it, anyway. I should have known that they would not make it so you lost all your jokers–that’s too brutal. But there is one condition that you have to win the boss round with one hand–that would be so so hard (Ed note: Not a final boss, thankfully).


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Indie games vs. Triple A games, part three

More about indie games and AAA games.

Side note: And, yes, this is probably the earliest I have done this. Sony is talking about buying FromSoft’s parent company. Not because of FromSoft, per se, but that’s just a cherry on top of the deal. And it made me immediately worried because Sony looooooves themselves an exclusive, and I have no intention of buying a PS5. Plus, my PS4 is busted, I think. Totally my own fault. I hate the PS4, anyway, and the DualShock 4. I HATE that controller so much, and I can’t even tell you why. Anyway, if From games suddenly become exclusives for the PS for the first year or so, well, that is going to make me very unhappy. But I doubt I would actually buy a console, anyway.

Just finished up a cute little game called Supurr Cat Cafe: Sandwich Rush by 2 Nerdy Nerds. At first I thought it was initially a mobile game, but now, I’m not so sure. It doesn’t really matter; I played it on the PC. The basic gist of it is that you (Olive. That’s your name, not just a fruit/vegetable/ingredient in your sandwiches) re-open (I think?) of a cat cafe. You and your cat, Maka.

It has a simple premise. Olive races around the cafe with a big platter over her head. She catches ingredients as they fall to make sandwiches. Gotta start with bread (with or without butter) and then add to it. You can slap a piece of second piece of bread whenever you want as long as there is one other ingredient between the two pieces of bread. If you put three different ingredients on the piece fo bread, then another piece of bread, it’s a stack (I think?). That’s the whole point of the game–making as many stacks as you can.

As the game goes on, you get different items you can buy to make your sandwiches better. You also can buy some things to decorate your cafe with. Oh, and of course you can adopt cats and put them in cute costumes. If you level them up, they will help out with the sandwiches. Unfortunately, they aren’t discriminatory about what ingredients they put on the sandwiches, which is a problem. You can’t put three of the same ingredients on the sandwich in a row, and you can’t serve a sandwich without bread on top of it. The cats will throw the ingredients on the sandwich so fast, I can’t always avoid the ones I don’t want.


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Indie games vs. Triple A games, part two

I was musing about Triple A games vs. indie games in yesterday’s post. Today, the nomination for Geoff Keighley’s game awards came out, and there was much consternation per usual. One of the controversial issues was that Shadow of the Erdtree (FromSoft) was named for Game of the Year. Why? Because it’s DLC. There are obvious reasons why this may be problematic. One, you have to play a big chunk of the base game just to get to the DLC. Well, you don’t have to as there is a way to get there much earlier, but you probably will have a miserable time in the DLC if you manage to do that. Like a really miserable time.

Let me put it this way. I went into the DLC for the first time, I was level 200 and something. I think.  It’s been a while. I had 38 Vigor, and I died to the first field boss (Nameless Mausoleum) for an hour solid. There was no running back to the boss arena, so that’s a pure hour of deaths. Why? Because he could one-shot me. Which I HATE in a boss. That’s not the point, though. The point is that I was not having any fun at all. I could have went elsewhere, but I was infuriated at this point. I had put in 225+ hours into the game thus far, was over level 200, and was getting absolutely decimated.

I respecced so I had 60 health, made a few other changes for this fight (like using a certain sword that is considered OP for its Ash of War) and got the boss in two more tries. Like that. I could not have done it  without all those points in Vigor, which I maintained throughout the DLC. it made things so much better for me.

I’ve been dipping into the indie world once again because I needed a break from Elden Ring. Do not get me wrong. I still love the game and will be playing it until the end of time. However, I needed a little bit of indie goodness. And I have so many demos on my Steam client from past indie game fests.

I just put a good hour into a game I bought some time ago called Crypt Custodian (Kyle Thompson). It’s about a black cat, Pluto, who dies and goes to the afterlife. He is prevented from entering the good place and is doomed by Kendra, the arbiter), to be a janitor cleaning up the afterlife. It’s a Metroidvania, and you can change accessibility options at any time. There are three modes, too. I have it on regular/normal at the moment and no accessibility options turned on, but I might change that. Why? Because I’m getting frustrated with the fall damage.


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Indie games vs. Triple A games

I’ve been thinking about games that I buy. Or rather, when I buy games. I’m not someone who buys big games on day one.

Side note: Yes, already. I want to preface this post by saying that when I talk about Triple A games, I am not referring to FromSoft games. I will buy any game they put out day one if it’s anywhere in the Soulsborne realm, and I don’t mean physical worlds. I mean anything with that kind of gameplay and story-telling. What I’m trying to say is anything not Armored Core.

They are the top tier for me, obviously. So much so that  I have two different lists of favorites. There is the FromSoft list which includes Elden Ring/Dark Souls III at the top, Dark Souls II, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro. Sekiro is not my favorite, but it’s still better than 80% of the games out there.

Here’s my problem. This is my standard for a Triple A game. Dark Souls was one of the first hardcore games I ever played. along with Torchlight (Runic Games) and Diablo III (Blizzard). Before that, I played casual games that included Hidden Objective Games (HOG), Match-3s and such. Needless to say, it was a leap to playing hardcore games.

Dark Souls broke me. It was unlike anytthing I’ve ever done before. Not just in games, but in life. It’s like speaking English all your life and then trying to recite a poem in Greek. You’re supposed to be able to play the game fifty or so hours. So I’ve read over and over. “No one” would ever need over a hundred hours to play the game. Except me, apparently. I’m not taking it personally because I have my physical limitations and because I’m just not good at these games. But it’s a patented untruth that no one would take a hundred hours.

I know that whatever anyone says is the time to play one of the From games, I just double it. It took me roughly 225+ hours on my first playthrough of Elden Ring. That’s double what most other people put into it, if not triple. Granted, I found most of the secrets (with a bit of help from the forums), but still. That’s a hefty time investment. I’m not saying it as a negative, mind. I definitely get more bang for my buck than most people. And  I have put in countless more hours than that with several more playthroughs.


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Tackling that Steam backlog one game at a time

I’m trying to get through my Steam backlog and the countless quirky indie demos that I keep adding to my list of games to try. It doesn’t help that Steam always has some kind of sale, and right now, the sales going on are cozy games related. This is entirely my jam. Putting aside FromSoft games (with great difficulty), I have two other categories of games that I play. Roguelike/lites and cozy games. There is some crossover between the two categories, but not that much.

If you were to ask me my favorite games outside of From games, they would be:

1. Night in the Woods (Infinite Fall)
2. Spiritfarer (Thunder Lotus Games)
3. Cozy Grove (SpryFox)
4. Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!! (David Galindo)
5. Hades
(Supergiant Games)

The first two are in the right order, whereas the next three are pretty interchangeable. I really related to Mae, the main character of NitW, because she was a moody black cat (all the characters were animals) who, as the game went on, became more and more like me. Crushing self-esteem problems, severe mental health issues, and she was bisexual. The last one is something you can play through the game and never find out, depending on what the choices you make. I was so pleased when it was revealed because at that point in time (2017), there weren’t that many games with bisexual characters. Some with gay characters, but not bi.

That would be five indie games, four of which are considered cozy….well, three are for sure. The fourth (CSD!2!! is debatable) is a cooking sim, which you think should be chill, but isn’t. It’s highly addictive, though, and the reason I prefer this game to the original is because I can decorate my restaurants in addition to making recipes.

In the past few days, I have tried to sttorm through my Steam backlog/Steam demos. It’s an uphill battle, though, because I add demos to my Steam client as a way to remember games I might be interested in. I have almost two dozen demos on my Steam client, and I’ve deleted a few I’ve recently tried as well.

Here are a few things that will immediately turn me off a game–if it makes me motion sick; if it requires a dexterity that I don’t have; or if it has a confusing/lack of tutorial. I just played one that was a puzzle-solving game (putting shapes into a big rectangle squares marked off inside the rectangle), and it was cute, but too simple for me.

I know that my tastes are very weird and particular. Ian has said it’s hard to find games for me because I am so damn picky (he was more diplomatic about it, but that’s what it boils down to). That’s how I am with pop culture in general, by the way. I dislike more than I like to the point that I’m comfortable saying that I don’t like movies and TV shows in general. In other words, a TV show or movie is going to have to work hard to win me over.


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Spells & Secrets–A Quick Look, part two

I have been playing an action rogue-lite indie game called, Secrets & Spells by Alchemist Interactive. I wrote part one of my A Quick Look about it here. At that point, I had cleared the first floor twice and died fairly quickly on the second floor. The only reward you get for beating the first floor boss is two full red hearts and one yellow heart (shield). Each hit costs half-a-heart, so basically, six total hits. Of course, if you have less than 2 full hearts worth of red heart damage, then the reward isn’t that meaningful.

It’s a minor complaint, but a complaint, nonetheless. I appreciate the hearts, obviously, but it’s just a weird reward. I would rather get an artefact or a spell (the former modifies the latter) as a reward, which is what most games of this ilk give you when you beat a boss. Still. I don’t want to be too harsh on this point because health is always welcomed.

Wait. No. I want to say a bit more. Here’s my issue with it. At the very beginning of the game, it’s a good reward. You start out with a full three hearts, which means you can take six hits. There will be light *SPOILERS* throughout this post, but nothing super big. I don’t think. Or rather, there isn’t much to spoil about the game. I mean, I could spoil the secrets, which I won’t do. The characters are, sadly, pretty forgettable and interchangeable. What do I mean by that? 

I mean that some of them are clearly based on Potter characters, but in general, the students were just generic kids who you would not notice on the streets. You get one or two original pieces of dialogue from them that give you background color to the school, but nothing more than that. They also give you tips for the game, which I appreciate, but it doesn’t make them more personable, honestly. I will say that I don’t know how deep the game goes, so this may change the further I get into the game. I kind of doubt it, though.

I do appreciate the four different student factions (gee, does that sound familiar? Complete with a different color for each faction?), just to shake things up. I like that you get different clothing as you do certain things for each faction. Such as using a spell from that faction in a run. I really like the style of the game. It’s cute and cartoon-y, and it’s just all around cozy.

Back to the bosses. I just did a run in which I beat the second floor boss. Easily. I have not yet explored the third floor so I can’t talk about that. I quit out after beating the second floor boss because I was tired at that point.


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Spells & Secrets–A Quick Look

I have a ton of games in my Steam backlog. Also called the Steam pile of shame. Every PC gamer has one (and, presumably, console players have their own backlog, too), and it’s often in the several hundreds if not thousands. My M.O. these days is to power through the demos I impulsively download during an indie fest and see if I like any of the games. At the same time, Steam has indie fests all the time. Like all the fucking time. Right now, they have their IndieCade Festival going. Which means more demos to try out!

You can see my dilemma. Every time I got rid of one demo, I added three more. That’s a slight exaggeration, but not that far from being the truth. I’ts a running joke with gamers–that there’s just no way to whittle down a backlog. I’ve thought about doing a series on it–playing all the games in my pile of shame, alphabetically, for five minutes each. I can usually tell if I’m going to like a game within the first five minutes. It’s not as if there has never been a game that didn’t grow on me as I played, but they are very few and far between. For better or worse, I know my tastes well–and this is for all pop culture. I can count on one hand a piece of pop culture that I thought I would hate and it turned out that I liked it.

There was a game that intrigued me when I saw the trailer/read the description. It’s Spells & Secrets by Alchemist Interactive. It’s in the vein of a (sigh) Harry Potter–by the way. I will be glad once we’re at the place where we don’t have to mention that series whilst talking about magic/fantasy worlds that are set in a school with kids. I know that this is the cultural touchstone, but I wince every time. That being said, it’s hard to avoid the comparison with this game so I’m going to unwillingly make a few–but as minimal as possible.

The story is pretty basic. You are new to this school and there are shenanigans going on. The first day you’re there (this is the demo), the school is attacked by creatures unknown. You have a basic wand and are given a basic (junior) spell. It’s a pew-pew spell. No, that’s not what it’s called, but that’s basically what it is. It’s the basic spell from afar, and it’s the spell I used the most by far in the demo. There is also a telekinesis spell that I will admit I haven’t gotten the hang of quite yet. It has it’s use, but it’s not a spell that I really care for. In fact, the best use of it so far is using it for a big-sized chess game.


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Indie games frustrations

I love indie games. I want to state that upfront because I’m going to delve into my frustrations, especially with a specific type of indie game. Binding of Isaac (Edmund McMillen). There. I said it. And to be clear, I adore Binding of Isaac: Rebirth. I 1001%ed it, and then played a run a day (roughly an hour) for years after. I’ve put in a Northerlion-amount of time into the game, and it was my comfort gaming for quite some time.

Then, Edmund ruined it by doing what many indie devs do–he listened to the community too much and broke it beyond repair. I’ve seen this happen many times with a popular indie game. The first was Nuclear Throne by Vlambeer. I loved that game. I adored it. I played it every day. It was hard as nails for me, but I didn’t care. Much. I beat the throne twice. But then I realized that I could not do the post-throne content because it was even harder, and that’s when I reluctantly gave up on the game. This was after 700+ hours. I quit cold-turkey once I realized I had hit a wall. I went back once when there was an update of additional content including new characters. It was still way too hard for me, and I quickly gave up again.

There was one game, Streets of Rogue (Matt Dabrowski) that handled it well, I thought. You could change the way the game played for the different characters to make it easier or harder depending upon how you felt like playing it. I found the game too hard to play ‘pure’. So I put a few mods on the soldier such as unlimited ammo and had way more fun with the game. I gave that one up because I grew more uncomfortable with the politics of the game as it went on, but I appreciated the generous modding you could do in the game.

Another game that had me quitting at the end (not the real end, but the ‘end’) was Dead Cells by Motion Twin. Which, by the way, is a developer that has an egalitarian company where everyone gets paid the same and supposedly has equal say. I qualify it because I don’t know; I don’t work there. Plus, I have a hard time believing any company is truly 100% hiearchy-free.

Anyway, I loved that game. It’s a roguelike/lite that has Souls elements to it and gorgeous graphics/environments. I adored the skills and the story/lore, and the ‘one more run’ feel to it. I love the ice skills and  would normally run with an ice build. It was a difficult game. But, I got better and better until I finally made it to the castle. Where, I would promptly die to the final boss (final, again, in quotes). Like in 10 seconds die. OK, not quite that quickly, but it was brutal. I had the max on damage reduction which was something like 80%, but it didn’t matter. Plus, the ice skills did not work on the final boss. He just laughed and was not frozen. At all.

So  I had to scramble to find the shop in the castle and hope that I could find items that were not ice-based–and that I had enough money to buy them. And then die, anyway, wasting an hour of my life. At this ponit, I had nothing else I could buy that would stay with me from run to run because I had bought them all. So I could do a full run and have nothing to show for it because I died in two seconds on the final boss. And I did not make it there very often. Maybe once in ten runs or so.

I gave up because it wsa not fun. I was not able to see enough of the final boss’s moves to formulate even a rudimentary plan for dealing with him before he killed me. When I talked about the game on the RKG Discord much later, I found I wasn’t the only person who had the same experience. Going through the game, feeling like a god with a fantastic ice build, only to die in less than 30 seconds to the final boss.


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