Game EXP Trilogy Part IV: Super Meat Boy, COGS, Jamestown (PC)

 

This is an interesting collection of games.  I enjoyed all three in their own right, but I only finished one.  I could see myself keeping one of these three installed to come back to on occasion, which is saying something.  So instead of being annoyingly cryptic, let's just get to the games in this month's Game EXP Trilogy that have been sitting in my Unfinished Games of Steam queue for the last 11-14 years.

Super Meat Boy

Systems: Xbox 360, Windows, Linux, OS X, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Wii U, Nintendo Switch

Release Date: October 20, 2010

Publisher: Team Meat

Developer: Team Meat

Time Spent: (3.9 Hours; Last Played October 24, 2015) + 13 Hours 30 Minutes

Partial Playthrough Videos on YouTube

You know, I was fully expecting to go back into Super Meat Boy, prepared to play for about 15 minutes and remember why it was that I stopped playing this game 11 years ago.  At the time, I was barely making it through Chapter 2: The Hospital, and the game wasn't being fun anymore.  For all of its "pixel-perfect platformer" reputation, Meat Boy seemed to be a really floaty jumper, and it didn't so much feel like I needed to be pixel-perfect, but rather to be able to account for how Meat Boy floated when jumping while either regular or X-running and mentally calculate that into when I jumped and what would be around Meat Boy when he landed.  While I still kind of feel that way about the mechanics, all thanks to having played and beaten (the main campaign) of Celeste, I now feel that I was able to make another go with Super Meat Boy.

Instead of jumping right back into the thick of it with World 2, the hospital stages with the fountains of broken syringes, I played a handful of levels from World 1. I quickly found my footing again through muscle memory, despite the 11-year gap in playing.  I remembered from muscle memory that I was mostly playing by holding down X to sprint, but this time, I thought I would take my time and forgo any desire to get through the stages quickly.  That lasted all of about 19 minutes before a level forced the player to sprint to make long jumps, and then it was just sprinting throughout the rest of the game.  There were a couple of late-game levels that required a combination of X running and regular movement running to make it through tight-fitting jumps between buzz saws, which was oddly nice to know that the game would, at times, force the player to slow down.

Overall, I found the game to be enjoyably difficult, compared to needlessly difficult, although that aspect still exists in the game.  If I wanted to "complete" the game, I would need to beat the default time on each stage, which then unlocks a harder version of the Light World stages in the Dark World, and I found a lot of those stages to be excruciatingly difficult; but I also consider those to be optional.  The second to last stage, World 6 Level 5, was one of those levels that was incredibly difficult, taking me just over an hour to beat, which both sounds like a lot of time and was a lot of time, but I frequently felt like I was making incremental progress, and so that made the game feel bearable.  The last level, the "boss" fight against Dr. Fetus, I actually enjoyed a lot more than I was expecting, for the sole reason that the level was on rails.  Because you could only progress when the predetermined moving blades aligned, and how purposeful the game had been about timing and placement up to that point, it meant that I just needed to figure out how and when to move.  And even with Dr. Fetus chasing you, I was able to ignore their attacks throughout the majority of the level, because as long as you kept moving when the game wanted you to move, the good Dr. was not really a threat until after you reached the final room.  

But that Final Part II stage, that was a pain in the ass, and I'm glad it's over.

Briefly, something else that really helped me get through the game was the music.  Danny Baranowsky's music throughout the game was that perfect blend of catchy and high-energy melodies that helped me to push forward when levels were feeling really hard.  Similar to the music in BIT.TRIP Runner, the never-ending enthusiasm of the music 100% helped me to get through this game.

COGS
Systems: Windows, Mac OS  X, Linux, PlayStation 3
Release Date: 2009
Publisher: Microsoft
Developer: Lazy 8 Studios
Time Spent: (56 Minutes; Last Played December 8, 2012) + 2 Hours 4 Minutes

COGS has a lot going against it.  First and foremost, it's a game where the primary mechanic consists of sliding block puzzles.  I don't like sliding block puzzles.  Never have.  I have a vague memory of standing either outside or in my neighbor's house, trying to figure out one of those birthday party favor sliding block puzzles; it had a yellow or green frame, but I don't remember what the picture was.  I recall getting so frustrated with the puzzle that either my neighbor or I took out the pieces, and we tried to put them back in, but the puzzle was essentially broken.  In Resident Evil 4, I was eternally thankful that the in-game time paused while trying to figure out that sliding block puzzle; who knew it was that easy?  Second, the game has varying levels of stars as part of your reward for completing each puzzle, made up of the time you took to complete the puzzle, the number of moves it took you to solve the puzzle, and.....  Lastly, and connected to the second point, levels are locked behind a set number of stars, so even if you beat a level, there's no guarantee that you'll be able to play subsequent levels if you don't have enough stars.  That whole nonsense again.

What COGS has going for it, though, is equally a lot.  The game is visually appealing as it gets.  The woodgrain of the board and tiles is that comforting cedar stain.  The brass accents on the steel pipes just pop.  The gears are large and somehow friendly-looking; I don't know how else to describe it.  In levels that use pipes, they're frequently this gorgeous shade of brass that denotes loving care has been taken with them, as opposed to dirty pipes rusted with age. The music is calming and helps alleviate the stress of the fact that I'm playing a sliding block puzzle.  I love the look and feel when I'm doing a puzzle that spans across multiple sides of a cube, and the satisfaction when that last block slides into place and the whole contraption works is quite the serotonin boost.

The game itself is broken up into three separate modes: Inventor Mode and Challenge Mode, and within Challenge Mode are Timed Mode and Moves Mode.  Inventor Mode is the primary source of puzzles, where you're graded on completion, speed, and the number of moves used.  Generously, just completing a puzzle gives you three stars, but to acquire three stars in the other two categories, you need to be fast and mindful.  Of the 51 levels, I've only made it to level 14 here, with only one level, the first, earning three gold stars in each completion for time and moves.  In Challenge mode, puzzles are unlocked from Inventor Mode, but here you're limited by either time (30 seconds) or moves (10 or fewer).  Moves Mode in Challenge Mode is probably my favorite because I know ahead of time that the puzzle is designed to be completed in 10 or fewer moves.  The problem I have with Timed Mode is that the timer starts at the exact moment the level starts, before you've even had time to register the level prompt and take in what the puzzle looks like.  By the time you're ready to move your first block, at least five seconds have already elapsed.  It doesn't feel great.

Jamestown: Legend of the Lost Colony

Systems: Windows, Mac, Linux, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch

Release Date: June 8, 2011

Publisher: Final Form Games

Developer: Final Form Games

Time Spent: (4 Hours 24 Minutes; Last Played January 27, 2014) + 3 Hours 12 Minutes

Gameplay Videos on YouTube

Like COGS, I have a love-skill relationship with Jamestown.  I love the aesthetic; I love the steampunk design and retrofuturism of a 16th century American colony story taking place on Mars with a lot of the same historical figures; John Smith is still a piece of trash, which still tracks.  I love the amazing soundtrack by Francisco Cerda and how the music at times comes across as dynamic, all because the game is on rails, so music cues can be "pre-programmed" to happen in time with events on the screen.  I love the "oomph" the game gives the player when destroying waves of enemies and the execution of special moves; visual impacts can be felt.

But I can't beat this game because of both a skill issue and how the game handles progression.

The game has five difficulty levels, from Normal to Difficult, to Legendary, to Divine, and all the way to "Judgement" (ie, stupidly difficult).  You can play the first three levels on any difficulty, but the fourth requires Difficult or higher, and the final level requires Legendary or higher.  I get that the game's progression requires you to get better at this type of bullet-hell game, and it doesn't help that I'm not particularly good at this genre either.  Something I found interesting was that the hitbox on each of the four playable characters/crafts seems to only be the size of your character, and not the ship they're piloting, and that enemies themselves do not cause damage, only the projectiles they're firing.  I'm sure that this plays into actually being good at this game, although for me, I found that I became really jumpy whenever the screen really filled up with enemy fire.

I did a bit of reading about the DLC that includes several additional characters/ships that have different abilities, and the consensus seems to be that the additional ships are really good overall.  Which got me thinking that maybe I could benefit from access to additional ships, but then that felt like paying to win the game, and that made me sad.  So I didn't pick up the DLC, which leaves in a tight spot.  Because the game doesn't have cloud saves, I'll either have to manually save whatever file it is that you're supposed to save to, then use for games that don't have cloud saves, or just start over from the beginning if I decide to uninstall the game, because I know that I'm not going to be able to beat it this time around either.  I might just have to resign myself to that fact, which I'm kind of okay with.  

Mostly.

So those were the recent additions to my current and "long?" running series, Game EXP Trilogy.  All three of these games were a lot of fun, but for COGS and Jamestown, it just boiled down to a skill issue, and one that I'm not so eager to build up just to say that I beat these two games.

I'm going to take the month of October off from publishing another article in this series so that I can focus on a couple of other games I'm working on, but I'll be back for November (or December if I get caught up again).  But there are plenty of games in my aging Steam backlog that I'll be getting to in the coming months.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Instrumental

MIDI Week Singles: "Cogs Puzzle Theme" - COGS (PC)

 

"Cogs Puzzle Theme" from COGS on Windows & macOS (2009)
Composer: Luke Gilbert
Album: Cogs OST
Label: Humble Bundle
Publisher: Lazy 8 Studios
Developer: Lazy 8 Studios

If I were going to listen to any music in a genre that I'm not a particular fan of, this piece, "Cogs Puzzle Theme," is the music that I would 100% be looking for.  As I've brought up a couple of times in the past, I'm not a huge fan of sliding block puzzles, and COGS being entirely just that, having some clockwork-esque, calming string and harp music while I fiddle around with half a dozen blocks and find myself in a significantly worse situation than when I started.

I should note that I extended the song, as it is presented on the soundtrack as lasting only 30.9 seconds, and there are several puzzles where you're expected to have finished before those 30.9 seconds have elapsed.  I am not one of those people, with the time component usually being what I either earn a bronze or no medal (meaning additional stars) on.  But that's okay with me.  I think if the song were more manic, fast-paced, or energetic, it would not only not work with the visuals, but I would likely find it incredibly annoying, and I probably would not have played as much of the game as I have, but I'll get into that in our next Game EXP Trilogy article.

For now, you can enjoy this short (although extended here) theme that plays in COGS when you're trying to solve an overly complex, yet simplistic, sliding block puzzle.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Instrumental

Game Review: Pokémon Picross (3DS)

I enjoy puzzle games, to a certain extent.  Well, I enjoy puzzle games that I understand and that I can figure out, at least on a rudimentary level.  I do not like sliding block puzzles, which I have mentioned in the past.  The puzzle mechanics of picross (aka Nonogram) I can get behind as it reminds of Sudoku but with a picture at the end.  Granted it's a pixelated picture, but it's still there.

Pokémon Picross is a "free to start" game developed by Jupiter and published by The Pokémon Company, and for a free to play game with the hint of microtransactions galore, Pokémon Picross is a great game with a surprising amount of content.  From what I can tell, the only microtransaction in the game is buying gems called Picrites which allow you to refill your energy, unlock new areas with new puzzles, unlock new and tougher puzzles, or use a Pokémon whose currently resting and depending on the specific Pokémon, the resting timer can run anywhere from one hour up to 29.  You are able to acquire Picrites by completing requirements for each puzzle, such as completing the puzzle under a set time, using only a certain type of Pokémon, or using a particular skill; more on Pokémon and their skills later.  You can also earn 7+ Picrites by completing a timed daily puzzle that are small and a lot of fun even though you do not create pictures so much as filling in where the puzzle tells you to; it's like a mental warm up. 

Pokémon Picross consists of 300 individual puzzles which you access by completing a puzzle which leads you along a predetermined path through zones/areas that have a number of puzzles.  Accessing these puzzles uses a certain amount of your energy (typically ~40 for a 10x10 puzzle and ~130 for a 20x15 puzzle), of which you start out with 200 and is slowly refilled by a timer, which refills at one energy per minute.

The point of adding Pokémon into the mix is an interesting one.  Once you complete a puzzle, you are able to capture that Pokémon and use them [you can use up to five after unlocking (using Picrites) additional slots] in subsequent puzzles.  Their abilities vary from fixing squares that you mislabeled, revealing an area for you, slowing down the timer by 10% (or more if you have additional "Slow Time" Pokémon in play), to letting you know which lines/columns could be figured out without additional blocks being filled in.  There are others of course, but no sense in listing them all hereOr, you don't have to use any of the Pokémon and solve the puzzles using your own skills, all of which are possible, but I admit that the 20x15 puzzles are pretty intimidating.

My one criticism of the game is with the larger 20x15 and 15x15 puzzles.  With puzzles of this size, the grid gets to be pretty small which makes filling in blocks occasionally difficult.  Sadly there is no way to zoom in on an area.  There have been a number of times where I tried to fill in a specific box only to remove my mark as I was a few pixels to the left and unmarked the box to the left.  Or by accidentally filling in a box I knew that wasn't supposed to contain a filled in mark, which becomes frustrating when you have a Pokémon slotted who has the ability to fix a limited number of mistakes and one of those passes is eliminated because the boxes are small in size on the screen. 

Basically, Pokémon Picross is a fun if you're looking for a puzzle game that you can pick up a couple of times a day to play for 10 - 30 minutes.  The fact that it's a free game that doesn't inundate you with asking you to buy an upgrade or purchase additional Picrites only makes the game more attractive.  So if you have any iteration of the 3DS (3DSXL, New 3DS, 2DS), I would highly recommend getting Pokémon Picross, even if you're not familiar with the Pokémon universe, I would recommend at least trying the game.  However, if you're the kind of person who needs/wants to do all of the puzzles as fast as possible and be able to access every area without waiting or paying for microtransactions, then this probably isn't the game for you.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Instrumental

P.S.  I think that a Super Smash Bros. Picross game would be pretty fun too, and not because I like the Super Smash Bros. franchise, but because it's a great conglomeration of famous and classic Nintendo characters.  Even more so if they use the original 14x14 or 14x28 NES sprites from their respective games.  Or maybe unlock picross puzzles using amiibos?  That would be a perfect use of that technology!

Game EXP: Neverout (NS)

 

A while back (Sunday, December 20th) I completed Neverout in a spree of completing twelve rooms in a single sitting, which considering my First Impressions article, was kind of a feat, but I will get to that in a moment.  If you are unfamiliar with Neverout by Polish developer GameDust, I suggest you read my First Impressions article first, then come back here and I will clear up some misconceptions I had about the game, some of which I already publically declared over on Twitter.  That being said, I will try to sum up what Neverout is about.  You are an undescribed person who mysteriously finds themselves in a cube of interlocking rooms filled with puzzles and traps that lead you into other rooms filled with more puzzles and traps which you complete as you make your way out (DO NOT WATCH THE TRAILER!!).

So, the format of Neverout is interesting, which is what threw me and my reason for initially being overwhelmed with the idea of the game after playing through the tutorial levels.  When you start the game, you play through 20 levels that give you a taste of how the game is played as well as how the color of the room prepares you for the types of traps and puzzles that are in each room.  Blue rooms have teleportation puzzles, yellow rooms have sliding blocks that can kill you, green rooms have electricity and/or spikes on spaces that will kill you, red have magnetic floor tiles that you have to get a sliding block onto.  But there was more to it than that past the tutorial stages and once you have completed those, you are taken to a central hub where you can decide what color room/puzzles you want to play.  It was at this point before I completed any of the four colored rooms that I made the assumption that each color would have its own 20 rooms to solve, but I was wrong and it turned out there were only 12.  And different elements from the different rooms can make their way into other puzzles, making them more and more complex.

In the blue rooms, you end up having sliding blocks along with the primary portals, in the green rooms, there ended up being portals, sliding blocks, magnets, spike pits, and the common electricity.  See, when you are playing, if you choose a room that is, at least at the moment, too difficult, you can leave at any time to return to the central room and pick another series of rooms to go to.  A green room with electricity, sliding blocks, and spike pits too much?  You can exit back to the hub and attempt a series of blue rooms with the teleportation (and sliding blocks) rooms.  This allowed me to attempt rooms and if I was overwhelmed or like I needed a change of scenery (or color), I could return to the HUB and choose a new room.  While there was zero in-game explanation as to how/why this was possible, I sided on the side of don't know, don't care.  And now that I think about it, that scream that you hear in the opening room just seems to be there to tell the player that you can die here and that there are other people in this series of cubic puzzles.  Almost like there could have been the inklings of a story that followed you through, but that was rejected for more puzzles.  Maybe.  That is just speculation.

For me, I initially thought that completing the yellow and blue rooms were the easiest for me,  and in that order.  For the portals, there was a fair amount of figuring out how the room needed to be oriented after moving a sliding block throughout the room to have it positioned just right so you could land on it next to the exit portal.  This used a lot of brainpower and I found that I could only attempt and solve two to three puzzles at a time before I needed to stop for the afternoon/day.  After flipping between the yellow and blue rooms, with doing a green or red room to give me something different to do, I had finished those first two series of rooms and decided to hunker down and complete the green room puzzles.  This might have been a bad decision because I found the green rooms to be the most difficult out of the entire game.  Especially once the spike pits were introduced, sometimes replacing the electricity floor tiles, but I just found myself only able to complete one before needing to put the game down.  

Then the morning of December 20th, I apparently was in the perfect headspace because I was able to complete a room that had been giving me troubles in what felt like fewer than 10 room rotations.  I started on Green-9 and soon finished the remaining three rooms, moving on to the remaining rooms starting with Red-4.  It was at this point, rather late in the game now that I think about it, that I started to focus on just one part of the puzzle instead of trying to take it all in once I was able to solve each puzzle in less time than if I tried to do to many things at once.  There were a couple of rooms however that you had to do a specific set of moves right off the bat or the room was, or at least seemed like it was unsolvable and the only way to reset was to have yourself killed (or I guess you could have returned to the HUB and then back to the room, but that would have been too many steps and taken too long).  I genuinely felt that the Red rooms were easier to manage than the Green rooms.

I will not reveal the end of the game, but I will say that it was a little anti-climactic, but that seemed built into the game.  Because after the first 20 rooms, you could complete the rest of the groupings of rooms in any order, there was no penultimate room that contained any kind of story point.  Once you finish the final room in the last group you have to complete, the lights reach the last portal and that takes you to the credits.  Kind of.  There is a little bit more to it than that, but that would be spoiling.  Perhaps if it took you to a final puzzle to solve that incorporated everything from electricity, spikes, portals, sliding blocks, and magnets in a room that was larger than XxX, that might have been a nice touch.  I of course say this now about a month out from already beating the game when past-me was perfectly fine with the game ending when it did.  

My only other critique might only be specific to the Switch port, but the game offered the ability to replay rooms after returning to the HUB.  As in, if I wanted to, I could replay the 3rd tutorial room.  The only reason I could think of is that in other versions, maybe there is a timer or an achievement to complete a room with a certain number of room rotations or the fewest number of steps to complete a room.  That is really it.

GameDust put together a fun game with an interesting concept that I loved, but only after I got past my preconceived notion that I would have an additional 80 rooms after the first 20 tutorial stages.  Maybe throw in more hints of a story like objects lying around in the HUB, scratches on walls, a pair of shoes in the corner of a room that flop around but have no actual bearing on anything that happens in the room.  Little touches like that that also build off of the scream you hear at the beginning.  Maybe in Neverout 2?

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Prelude to the Void

First Impressions: Neverout (NS)

My first thought before starting Neverout was that I was about to play a game that looked a lot like the 1997 Canadian film Cube (DO NOT WATCH THE TRAILER as it contains major plot spoilers, just watch the film here), where a group of strangers band together to find their way out of a series of puzzle and trap-laden interlocking rooms.  Essentially that kind of what Neverout from developer Game Dust is about, but it is simplified a bit here.  First off, there is, at the moment at least, no narrative beyond solving the puzzle in each room (which I will get to) to move along to the next room.  In each room you are able to move along all surfaces in the six-sided room, rotating the room so that you are always on the bottom of the room.  By rotating the rooms, you can affect some objects in the room like sliding boxes, which if you are positioned wrong when you rotate a room, can crush and kill you.

Neverout starts you out in a four-walled room without any context as to why you are there, how you got there, or what you are supposed to do.  Although the mechanical chunk noise followed by a scream from an adjoining room indicates that there is something that can very much kill you.  But, because this is a video game, it is obvious to figure out that after you seemingly wake up, that you need to do something.  As you start moving around the room, you come to a wall and, perhaps by accident, you move forward "at" the wall, only to find that the room rotates and a portal appears on the ceiling with 02 on it.  There is also a mechanical grinding sound to further give credence that the room is rotating as opposed to you being able to scale walls.  Since this is a new addition to the room, you check out this portal which opens up as you approach it.  You fall through and are now in another four-walled room where a cat-walk comes slicing out of the walls, although it is harmless.  These are the tutorial levels, giving you the basics for how the puzzles work in the game, and how to get you in the right frame of mind so to be able to solve them. For the most part.  Each new mechanic introduced in the 20 tutorial levels is visualized by one of five different color-coded rooms:

• Beige/Yellow:  Catwalks and sliding blocks (blocks can kill you).
• Blue: Teleportation squares.
• Green: Electricity barriers (electricity can kill you).
• Red: Buttons that require a block to pass over them (which then remains stationary).

Once you finish the 20 levels of the tutorial you are taken to a HUB room of sorts that will put you in another 20 rooms of a specific color where you do only those types of puzzles.  So when you enter the red portal, you will be doing the button (see above) puzzles.  20 of them.  As in 20 more puzzles.

One thing I want to quickly mention is the movement mechanic, and I say mechanic because this was a conscious decision by the developers to restrict movement.  Even though Neverout is first-person, moving is still on a grid.  You can look around as smoothly as you please, but when you move, you cannot move diagonally, only straight, back, left, or right.  This restricted movement is because there are a number of puzzles that you could cheat your way to the portal by skirting the diagonal and potentially bypass the solution.  By forcing the player to only move along the grid, it ensures that they are forced to solve the puzzle the way that the designers intended.  That is not to say that you cannot glitch your solutions, especially if you are playing it in VR, but on the Switch, I do not see cheesing out the solution to be an option.

Presently, I have finished the first 20 levels of the tutorial and then scattered levels from the rest of the rooms, primarily from the beige/yellow puzzles, being some of the less complex puzzles especially compared to the teleportation and electricity barrier rooms.  I have found myself able to do a couple of puzzles at a time, but then I have to stop, especially if I become stuck, frustrated and a little dizzy.  There are times when I have found it difficult to tell which way is up and then I remember to look down at the ground.  Thankfully you are able to exit out of a room at any time and go back to the HUB as I will then sometimes attempt another color, but other times I will just stare at the various rooms, then exit out of the game, because 100 of these puzzles is a lot.  Like, a lot - a lot.

If there were only 10 puzzles for each color, thereby eliminating 40 puzzles from the game, you would still have this fun first-person puzzle game with 6o puzzles, but for me, knowing that there are 20 puzzles just seems daunting in a way that feels almost oppressive.  That is the best way I have to explain it.  Maybe it would work better, as in I would feel more compelled to play more during each sitting if there was a story, character development, music that was not primarily ambient, but it is really all that I can handle.  Typically after Neverout I will head over to Mario Picross on the Super Nintendo app and play a couple of puzzles there just to mentally cool down because I need a bit of a breather after that.

I could see myself not finishing Neverout, relegated to the pile of Switch games I have started by not completed because I am stumped and refuse to look up solutions on GameFAQS or YouTube, but I think if I keep the game around and play a couple of levels here and there I will eventually finish it.

Eventually.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

I'll Wait In This Place Where The Sun Never Shines

Game EXP: Arkham Horror: Mother's Embrace [Part II: The Game] (NS)

 

Arkham Horror: Mother's Embrace
Platform: Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Xbox S/X, PC
Release Date: March 23, 2021
Publisher: Asmodee Digital
Developer: LuckyHammers, Asmodee Digital

I initially had some (a lot of) trouble writing the article for LuckyHammers (RIP 2019) and Asmodee Digital's Arkham Horror: Mother's Embrace as played on the Nintendo Switch when I started back in April.  I decided to break the one article up into two because I felt that was how I was mentally breaking down the game when I thought about my experience playing it and how it might be perceived by unfamiliar audiences.  I was also afraid of coming off as gatekeeping-like because there were a lot of times that this game felt like it was made for fans of Mansions of Madness and I could tell what the developers were trying to do, and other times that I felt that people who have not played the board game may not enjoy the video game.   In the original draft of this article, I found that it was quickly getting out of hand, both in terms of its composition and the flow of information mixed with anecdotes, so splitting this up into separate and slightly more focused articles seemed like the best way to continue writing and remain sane; although I am still going to be jumping around a lot because I was unable to write this in any other way.

Conklederp and I are avid fans of the Mansions of Madness board game (both first and second editions by Fantasy Flight Games) and we have delved a few times into the card game Elder Sign.  Both games exist in the shared Arkham Horror Files universe along with the original Arkham Horror board game, Eldritch Horror, and a slew of similarly themed card games.  Arkham Horror: Mother's Embrace (AHME) was originally announced back in 2018 as Mansions of Madness: Mother's Embrace but later changed the name to Arkham Horror, I assume to keep the game under the primary umbrella of Arkham Horror Files rather than one of the side-games.  You can read more about the game's delay and the changing of development companies over on Dicebreaker's article from November 2020.  I bring this up because I feel that it plays into the expectations of a traditional mystery/adventure video game and the final product that was released.

AHME is based on the mechanics of a board game and a lot of the time it feels like you are playing a single-player board game within a video game setting.  You take control of a primary character chosen at the start of the game and other pre-determined characters join your group as you play through the various scenarios.  Each character has both health and sanity points with HP typically in the 15+ range while SP was between 6-8.  This disparity tells you immediately that the odds are stacked against the characters suffering mental trauma than physical trauma, but more on that later.  There is no dice rolling or the usual action limitations that you have in board games (number of actions you can perform each turn) because that would make the game cumbersome and instead, you move around the playable area as you would any other 3rd person exploration game.  There are objects to interact with, some are merely just observing curios like paintings or a disemboweled corpse, while others you are able to interact with. 

Thinking again about the board game, having Hit Points means that once you reach 0, you become injured and your HP resets, but if it reaches 0 again, you are killed.  In AHME, your character only passes out for the duration of the fight unless you have an item to revive them mid-battle, although there are some sanity and status effects that can cause damage while you are exploring your location, but I never had a character "die" outside of a fight.  Sanity Points in AHME operate differently than in the board game, where you become insane when you reach 0 and die if they reach 0 again after being reset.  While bandages are used to heal HP, the only item I consistently came across to heal SP were cigarettes, which also caused 1 HP damage (because smoking is bad kids; no but really, it is), but my biggest problem was that there were far too few cigarettes to be found, which made acquiring trauma feel inevitable; maybe that was the point?  Here, you acquire trauma, but that trauma is already built into your character and you are actually able to see ahead of time what that trauma will be when their SP reaches 0, because it will reach 0.  Knowing ahead of time what trauma a character could experience allowing you to choose which character would have the least inconvenient traumas that would affect your chances of completing an upcoming scenario.  Having this knowledge is not what this type of game should be about, and instead should have had the trauma be randomly picked from a collection of possible traumas to add a sense of fear and unknowing.  This was another major critique I had.  Having trauma should have felt more impactful than it really was and more often than not, it just felt more like an inconvenience than anything else.

Another game mechanic that dealt with going insane and acquiring trauma that felt like it should have been more feared was the Mythos Clock.  This was a five-pointed pentagram clock displayed in the upper right of the screen that advances if you fail a skill check (see below) and the clock reaches five.  During the first scenario, I was actually pretty concerned every time the Mythos Clock inched closer to five as I was unsure what type of horror the game would unleash on my characters.  By the time I reached the third scenario, the Mythos Clock became an inconvenience similar to trauma, that I sighed at and little else.  Similar to traumas, having your initiative taking a slight hit or requiring everyone to make a sanity check or just straight up taking -2 to your SP is something that I can live with.  There was an item you could use to reset the Mythos Clock, but for whatever reason, you were only allowed to use it while you were actively engaged in combat.

Speaking of items, (and better transitions), inventory management was actually a nice part of the game, something you never have to worry about in Mansions of Madness.  In AHME, each character only has four inventory slots which you could fill with equipment at the beginning of each scenario.  Here you chose from all of the items you gathered in previous scenarios that were now open to all characters; re-equipping everyone was not bad at all and I would have actually hated having to unequip and then re-equipping everyone.  Having a limited inventory does make sense to a certain extent if you think of this being a realistic game with characters who are not pack mules, but then again you are investigating a cult obsessed with cosmic horror resurrections in 1926, so realism is not a requirement.  Most of the time, I would have characters armed with a ranged weapon, a melee weapon, an item that granted a buff to one of their skills, and either a healing item or empty to make room for items found during a scenario.

Coming from the board game which does have sliding block and codebreaking puzzles (think Mastermind), I was pretty disappointed to find out that puzzles as a mechanic were completely removed and replaced by contextual clues and the pressing of a single button in order to solve the puzzle.  Each character is proficient in a particular skill (Search, Manual, Willpower, Social, Logical, Physical) that can assist with them solving a puzzle, otherwise you have to essentially guess what the appropriate action to take would be or you suffer another advancement on the Mythos Clock.  A few scenarios into the game, you come across the reporter Rex Murphy who has a unique attribute that gives him an additional skill that can help to determine an additional clue when solving a puzzle, making them very useful to have in your party since the investigating character pulls information from everyone in the group, not just the individual who is interacting with the object.  Often times this would lead me to include Rex in the party when given the option, but I would also choose characters that seemed to make sense for them to be going to specific locations, but that is just me roleplaying instead of thinking strategically.

The biggest frustrating thing about the game is the load times.  Oh, bloody hell the load times!  I do not know if this is an issue on the Nintendo Switch and if it primarily happens in handheld mode, but these were easily the worst loading times I have experienced for any game on the Switch.  

Thankfully the game would only need to load when you started a scenario and when you finished.  Moving between floors in locations or cutting between gameplay and cinematics would typically only take a few seconds.  The load times starting the game would easily take over a minute, oftentimes upwards of 1m30s on average.  One time in particular it went as long as 1m48s.  What is kind of ridiculous about this is that there is music playing in the background while the game is loading, but there apparently was nothing in the game's code to tell it to repeat because the song would end before the game finished loading and there would just be dead air.

As long as we are now discussing things that bothered me about the game, there was a stage that took place in a swamp, which in and of itself was fine, but the game itself looked off.  First and foremost, this area felt more like a physical board game than any other stage.  When you had your character walk through swamp-like areas, there was zero interaction with the ground, as in areas that the characters should have been up to their knees, they were standing on like it was hardpacked dirt.  There were some textures to plants and rocks and the trees were not exactly two-dimensional panels that rotated with the characters, but the swamp water, which you could walk on like a painted garage floor, made it feel like the characters were not a part of their environment, just placed there as an afterthought.

Another issue I had was commentary by a character throughout the entire game who was never in your group.  Without giving too much away, it does kind of make sense by the end of the game, sort of and in the loosest way, but it still seemed strange.  You would be exploring a room or engaging an abomination that had been trying to kill you, and this character would give you advice or analysis of a scene.  From a narrative standpoint, it seemed like it might be more fitting if you were reading a book, but within the game and the game world itself, there would have been no way for your playable characters to have any of this information.  Not that the information was integral to completing a scenario or giving hints on how to solve puzzles, just commentary akin to sports commentators being broadcast into a football player's helmet between plays.  Like in the scene here, the investigators were questioning the origin of the sigils and runes written on the floor, and the character interjects that creature may spring back to life and kill you if you do not leave.

The optimization of the game for the Switch felt like it could use some improvements, both in terms of fixing some bugs and improving the frame rate of cutscenes towards the end of the game.  In one instance, the dialogue while searching a mailbox had been swapped with dialogue for searching a table at a cafe, and vice versa.  In the same location, one search location had code/text instead of the in-game text. Going into the final battle is when I felt the game suffered the most because it almost felt that whoever was in charge of Switch optimization did not seem too focused, especially after watching a video on YouTube for how the cutscene should have played out (major spoilers!); I will include a video I captured on the Switch from the same scene far below the article as it does contain major spoilers.  I could chalk it up to being played in handheld mode, but that should have been something to have been accounted for.

My last gripe with the game was the end.  In Mansions of Madness, there is always an epilogue that is very Lovecraftian in nature if you succeed or fail.  When you successfully complete a scenario the wording can still fill you with dread and oftentimes, successfully completing a game simply means that you escaped alive to tell your tale, but the cosmic horror is still likely to strike again, possibly through influencing another cult to try to bring its consciousness into the world.  You do not so much save the world as prevented this one event from coming to fruition but likely have suffered physically and mentally because of the events.  There is an open-ended-ness to a number of Lovecraft's stories and to the epilogues in Mansions of Madness, but this one felt only half-written.  Maybe I was just hoping for too much, but once the credits started rolling, I felt kind of ". . . huh. . .  Okay."

You know what, I think I am going to leave this article at that, which I realize is kind of a downer with you have come this far and only finding out now that this is not the end, but the middle.  I promise you that Part III will be a shorter article and full of a lot of the fun that I did actually have playing.  And I did have fun, otherwise, I probably would not have completed the game or even set out to write this series of articles, and also being the main reason why it has been so difficult for me to write about.  So feel free to visit us again on Friday for the final article in this (now) three-part series looking at Arkham Horror: Mother's Embrace.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Such Attitudes

BEWARE: MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW

#IndieSelect: Mekorama (NS)

I received a copy of Mekorama on the Nintendo Switch from publishers Rainy Frog and Ratalaika Games and developer Martin Magni for Xinthus' #IndieSelect event last week.  The game was given and received without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and the experience be shared through social media channels.  All words unless otherwise noted are my own and all pictures included in this article, unless otherwise noted are from my own experience playing the game.

Judging by the pictures included in Xinthus' initial post about Mekorama, I was not sure what type of game I was getting myself into but it looked like some type of Minecraft isometric puzzle game.  It is not that.

I have not played a lot of games that fit this mold of isometric environmental puzzle games with FEZ and Captain Toad's Treasure Tracker come to mind, but Mekorama is not a clone or love child of either of those titles.  In Mekorama, you play as a robot who has a B on its chest (who I have and will be referring to here on out as Bryan) and you have to get them from their starting location to the goal of the stage.  Along the way, you have to manipulate certain pieces of the environment to manually move Bryan along, with objects like sliding platforms, moveable blocks, elevators, and rotating whirligigs all the while avoiding hazards like lethargic robots, aggressive robots, and electrical traps.  I would say that for 90% of the time I spent playing before writing this article (about three hours) I used exclusively touchscreen controls as I found them to be very intuitive (if you are already familiar with touchscreen controls).  Two-finger pinching zoomed-in, two-fingers apart zoomed out, moving your finger would rotate the screen, et cetera.  I never felt that I needed to use the controller, especially on later levels (Level 17 

I want to bring up the music early on because it is just so good in the way that it integrates into the game without being in the way or too ambient.  But, it is pretty ambient in the way that a lot of the music in Breath of the Wild is ambient, but the music in Mekorama has another layer to it.  According to Martin Magni, the music is both procedural and dynamic which is always cool when it is pulled off well.  And here it is pulled off very well.  There have been a number of instances when clicking on a place for Bryan to move creates a specific tone on a piano and then the next couple of notes in the music seem to play off of that one note, either building on it or just reusing it in a laid-back jazzy kind of way.

The game is split up into Easy Levels, Medium Levels, Tricky Levels, and Hard Levels with each set of levels being comprised of 25 individual levels, which is quite a lot of content for a game that retails for $4.99, but you could also argue quality over quantity.  After the first 25 levels in Easy, I feel that a lot of the levels were fairly well-paced in terms of difficulty.  The first handful of stages do a decent job of explaining the basic mechanics of the game and never feeling that there was a significant jump in difficulty that made a level feel impossible.

Except one level.

The Number of Times I Was Killed Here Is Slightly Embarrassing.

Level 17: Bot Bypass gave me a bit of grief in that was the introduction of a new mechanic, the antagonistic electrified  R-Bot who will zap you when you get within one square (both adjacent and diagonally) of them.  Knowing the type of game this was trying to be 17 puzzles in, I felt that being able to deftly avoid the R-Bot was not supposed to be the point, and I eventually decided to use the Hint system, which ended up not being as helpful as I was expecting, but that was because after trying to pass the level for the last  7 1/2 minutes, I failed to let the R-Bot do a full rotation of its patrol, otherwise, I would have seen it do what I needed it to do.

I Feel You, Bryan. I'm Tired of A-Bot's Antics too.

Patience.  I should have realized this from Level 7 Pagoda Push, being one of the levels that I have seen some people post about on Twitter, being one of the more frustrating levels in the game (along with Level 15 Back Track) which does require a lot of patience.  Pagoda Push introduces A-Bot, a computer-controlled robot whose only purpose is to get in the way.  In Pagoda Push, there really does not seem to be a specific puzzle, but more of a waiting game as Bryan inches forward forcing A-Bot to also move forward up until you reach the Goal. In Back Track, you just have to help A-Bot down the tower and then move after it passes your starting hovel and then backtrack back up the tower to the goal.  For these two levels, in particular, I feel like a shorter level would have been more appropriate and less time consuming to get across the same point.  But I am not a game designer, just a player.

And with that, Martin Magni also included a custom level designer that is unlocked from the beginning.  When you boot it up, you are greeted with a blank screen and nearly endless possibilities.  Kind of.  I did tool around with the level designer, not so much knowing what I was doing, but trying to create something that looked more like Level 1 Crash Course than Level 21 Dual Controls.  I feel like I went in expecting a toolset that was easy to use like Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS, but that was not was I ended up working with.  I am also not sure if this is the same toolset that Martin Magni used as I do not know if I would be able to recreate Level 20 Factory Run or Level 27 Magical Number 7.  Those two levels specifically have a lot going on behind the scenes and outside of using graph paper to plan out each level/layer of the stage, I would be and was overwhelmed by making something that was both functional and akin to the levels in Easy.  This really goes to show the level of creativity that was put into each of the 100 puzzles in this game, which were probably not created on the Switch.  My biggest gripe with the level creator on the Switch, using either the touchscreen or the controller, was being able to line up anything that was not a block.  I did try for far longer than it should have, to simply place a pipeline as a track for the block to run along, but it took so many tries to even get the right pipe attached at the right spot that my screen was littered with misplaced pipes; then deleting them and not anything else I had purposefully placed made me a bit anxious.  The last negative thing I have to say specifically about the Switch port is that there is no way to share levels either between friends, or an online marketplace-of-sorts where people can share their creations.  It looks like this functionality exists on the mobile versions of the game (as there are QR codes you can scan), but an update to the Switch game would be do greatly in this era of Super Mario Maker.

My only other critique is how the game operates when you either die (zapped by electricity) or fall off of the playable area.  What I mean by that (you can watch below or just continue reading my rambling) is that in some of the stages there are elements like spinning gears or blocks that pop out of walls (think Wipeout) knocking Bryan off of platforms, ledges and anything else they're standing on.  Or in the case of any number of levels, moving a platform too quickly will cause Bryan to loose his balance and fall to the ground.  The issue that I take is that if Bryan does fall, you are freely able to walk around the area (or swim if Bryan lands in water) doing nothing but walking (or swimming).  The level does not restart.  When you die (as in the case with Level 17 above), Bryan's body will float for eternity.  The only way to restart a level is if you manually press start (or the pause icon in the upper right corner) and press the reload button.  Now, I would not expect the game to immediately restart the level if there is no way of recovering, but maybe a three-second gap between when Bryan dies or gets up off the ground after falling would have been nice.

So, after about three hours of playing through the Easy Levels, the first four of the Medium Levels, and spending about 15-20 minutes with the Level Creator, I feel like I have a pretty decent grasp on Mekorama although I still could not tell you what the name of the game means.  The physics surrounding Bryan can be a little wonky sometimes but Martin Magni knew this when he was developing the game as the B actually stood for the way that Bryan would bumbling walk through levels (and also why its color is yellow and black).  Would I recommend this game?  Sure, and especially at the $4.99 price point, playing through all 100 levels will probably take some time (although hopefully there are not too many that require the player to wait for the A-Bot to do anything) and from what I have played (just over 25% of the game), the puzzles are still fun to figure out, even if Bryan is far from the most coordinated walker.



~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian
Now I Understand


P.S.  As I play through the Medium Levels (and possibly through the Tricky and Hard Levels as well) and fool around with the custom level generator some more, I might write up a follow-up article in the coming weeks.