Video game August

I realize this naming scheme for my video game review posts will start causing name collisions soon, but I’m too lazy to come up with a new one right now. Anyway, I’ve had a lot of free time these past few months, so I’ve played a lot of video games.

Against the Storm

“Look, I played a roguelike that’s not a deckbuilder!” is what I would say if Against the Storm was not a deckbuilder. But despite everyone labeling the game as a city-building roguelike, the underlying gameplay is more tactical than strategic. Instead of deciding things like zoning, transportation, or tech tree milestones—choices often driven by long-term plans—your most important decision is which building to draft. And often, you pick a building to finish a short-term goal, or patch some sort of deficit. In fact, strategizing is almost impossible, because you don’t know which buildings you’ll get in your next draft.

You only keep a city for two to three hours before winning or losing the run. This sidesteps my main gripes with the city builders I’ve played, where there doesn’t feel like there’s much that’s new with a city, after growing it for several hours. The sheer combinatorial variety arising from buildings, orders, cornerstones, species, biomes, glade events, and world events, is staggering. There are roguelikes you can play for tens of hours, and roguelikes you can play for hundreds; this is the latter. I’ve over ninety hours and I’ve yet to play two runs that feel the same.

The tactical focus extends to worker management, another major component of gameplay. Much time is spent shuffling workers between buildings, to address changing resource needs, or optimize for workers’ specialties and preferences. One main goal is maximizing worker satisfaction, which in addition to being influenced by employment and housing, is also influenced by food, clothing, and services. High-level gameplay involves allowing and forbidding consumption of these goods at key times. One thing I enjoy about city builders is efficiently using resources to satisfy competing needs, and Against the Storm has this too.

At times, however, the game takes this to the extreme. Preventing workers from leaving sometimes devolves to juggling workers, consumption control, and favor. The difficulty curve starts steep and stays steep, though this is offset by the excellent wiki. The strong meta-progression helps at first, but its impact feels much slower starting around midway. Despite this, of the six or seven deckbuilding roguelikes I’ve played in the last few months, only Against the Storm made the cut of getting my explicit recommendation.

I Was a Teenage Exocolonist

I like to start my game reviews by pinning a game down to its genre, but I Was a Teenage Exocolonist defies most labels I’ve attempted. Is it an RPG? There’s stats, I guess, but the “combat” and “exploration” aren’t central enough that I’d call it one. Is it a visual novel? There’s certainly an emphasis on choices and relationships, but I think its mechanical richness puts it squarely outside of a VN. Perhaps I’ll simply call Exocolonist a queer sci-fi coming-of-age adventure game.

Gameplay is driven by conversations. There’s an overworld that you can move in, which is mostly used for navigating between conversations, and picking up the occasional item. The combat-like mechanic, challenges, consists of arranging cards drawn from a deck, by making sets and sequences and using their effects, to maximize a score. Challenge results affect stats, which certain choices are locked behind. Items can be used to change cards and thus scores, boost stats, or as gifts.

These mechanics are optional, but none of them feel superfluous. In fact, I would’ve enjoyed Exocolonist much less without them; the integration of gameplay with the story felt essential to the experience. Something about being unable to do everything, of being forced to make choices. Not to say the characters and plot weren’t independently strong, which they are, but the mechanics strengthen the sense of what-ifs, and make the endings hit that much harder.

Endings here is plural, because of course, there are a wide variety of outcomes based on your choices, and the game encourages you to experience several endings. Unfortunately, I’ve only had the patience to play two or three runs, due to the repetitiveness of several interactions. And while the narrative takes a stab at critiquing social structures, and exploring queerness, it felt somewhat underdeveloped throughout my playthroughs. But no other game I’ve played these past few months has shown as much heart as Exocolonist, and for that, I give it my unreserved recommendation.

Heaven’s Vault

What drew me to Heaven’s Vault was the promise of working on language puzzles, but what kept me playing was my curiosity. In the vein of games like Outer Wilds or Tunic, the protagonist in Heaven’s Vault is the world, and the main objective is to string together a coherent narrative from fragmented and limited information.

You control Aliya, an archaeologist, through point-and-click interactions in an open world. You can converse with other characters and the robot that follows you around. Mostly the robot, though. Examining artifacts often yields fragments of writing, transitioning the game to a close-up view of the glyphs, where you can play a minigame of assigning translations. Travel between locations happens via driving minigame, where you sail your spaceship through the cosmos. The sailing felt fiddly at first, but it made sense after sticking with it.

Compared to Chants of Sennaar, the conlang puzzle in this game goes for depth rather than breadth. Unlike Sennaar, there aren’t that many giveaways for translations, and the confirmation is more sporadic. There’s not much going on linguistically, probably because it’s designed to be solvable without taking external notes. But there’s enough going on that it’s not trivial. And interacting with the world itself is sometimes a puzzle: like searching for places likely to have writing, or manipulating ancient machinery. It all contributes to the experience of solving a gripping mystery.

It’s a good thing that the world is the main character of Heaven’s Vault, because the characters that get to have dialogue aren’t as well-written. Aliya’s actions are confusing and contradictory at times. Movement and travel is slow and repetitive, and I’ve found the slow walking speed to be insufferable multiple times. If you run into this, there do exist mods that’ll adjust the pacing to be less frustrating.

Gemcraft - Frostborn Wrath

The breakout Flash tower defense games may be Bloons TD and Kingdom Rush, but I think the greats are Desktop TD, Pokémon TD, and the GemCraft series, the latest entry being GemCraft - Frostborn Wrath. Like any TD, a variety of monsters march along a path toward your wizarding orb, and you build towers to attack these monsters and protect your orb.

GemCraft introduces several twists on top of this formula. A tower’s function is determined by the gem slotted into it. Different colors of gems have different effects, like slowing, damage over time, or critical hits. Gems can be upgraded, combined, and swapped independent of the towers they’re placed in. This contrasts with most other TDs, where each tower’s special effects are fixed, and follow its own upgrade path. Using gems adds a neat tactical layer: instead of paying for more gems, you could socket gems from one tower to another, at the price of a cooldown; you can combine two different colors to increase damage output and have the specials from both, at the price of weaker specials; you could scale the same gem indefinitely, or use more gems.

The gem-and-tower system exemplifies GemCraft’s design commitment to compositionality. In addition to socketing gems in towers, you can socket gems in traps, which decreases their damage output and range considerably, in exchange for a faster firing rate and stronger effects. You can also put gems in amplifiers, which boost the effects of adjacent towers and traps. You can use gems for bombs, which deal damage directly at the cost of sacrificing them. You can use gems to enrage monsters, making them stronger in exchange for more XP. Your life pool, rather than being a different resource, is shared with your money, so it scales naturally, rather than needing special treatment. I’m still in awe about how elegant it all feels, and how different things can feel without introducing new mechanics.

The GemCraft games are differentiated with their level design and meta-progression. Frostborn Wrath has new kinds of flying enemies, which act kinda like boss enemies and require special attention; they’re fun to deal with, but can be tedious at times. There’s also a talisman system, kinda like equipping items with specific bonuses. Unfortunately, the later-game parts can be a bit grindy, especially if you’re playing on the original difficulty. I recommend playing on Chilling to soften this. The story is a bit tacked on, and the music is kinda meh as well.

Honorable mentions

Moonstone Island is a creature-collecting deckbuilder. Don’t be fooled by its aesthetic similarity to Stardew Valley: farming, fishing, dating, and cooking are all secondary mechanics. The star of the show is exploration and combat, which is a kind of combination of Pokémon and Slay the Spire. The game felt tedious long before I finished the main story, though, and I wish it leaned into its combat more; as-is, it feels kinda tacked on.

Pâquerette Down the Bunburrows is a sokoban-like about exploiting an algorithm. What I like most about Pâquerette is its characters. The dialogue is cute, charming, funny, and witty. The puzzles themselves are clever, sure, but after a few hours of gameplay I felt like I’d seen everything, and didn’t feel compelled enough to continue. Maybe I just don’t like puzzle games.

LOK Digital is a word-based puzzle game. It’s an adaptation of the puzzle book, which you can download for a name-your-own-price PDF on itch.io, if you want to preview it first. In fact, I’d recommend playing with the PDF until you figure out what each keyword means, and then play the digital version. It’s great, and unlike Pâquerette I did end up finishing it. I recommend it, sure, but I don’t think I can ever enjoy a puzzle game enough that I’d write a whole above-the-cut review.

Demonic Mahjong is a mahjong deckbuilding roguelike. That’s the same description I gave to Aotenjo, which I reviewed a year ago. While they do share the similarities of upgrading your tiles and having items and such, the core gameplay is quite different: you build your hand all at once and score it, like Mahjong Soul’s Sky-High Ambition minigame. I’m surprised by the amount of depth, though for some reason I wasn’t super interested in playing lots of runs.

A Little to the Left is a cute puzzle toy about arranging things. The graphics are gorgeous, and the music and sound design is lovely. Solutions can be quite finicky at times: you need good color discrimination and enough patience to drag things around until they work. But most levels are quite satisfying, especially relative to how little work you put in. I cannot recommend paying full price for it, nor can I recommend the DLCs, given how little content there is.