Knights of the Cardboard Castle

FTL is a Kickstarter-funded indie game that I considered backing for a while. I ultimately didn’t but I did buy it recently when it went on sale on Steam. After playing it for a short time I’m glad I didn’t back it. As advertised, this is a rogue-like and I must say not a very deep one at that. I’ve never been a fan of rogue-likes and playing this game reminded why this is so. Some comments:

• The premise here is that you control a single ship that is part of a Federation. Your mission is to return home to warn about the invasion of the Rebels. This involves jumping from system to system and from sector to sector, all the while keeping just one step ahead of the Rebel fleet. It’s a simple mechanic to limit your ability to fully explore each sector and to give the game a sense of tension.

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The original Deux Ex is highly regarded as one of the best examples of games that offer players genuine choice. Unfortunately I never did get around to playing it or its less celebrated sequel. So knowing of the series’ reputation, I bought this prequel game a while back when it went on sale.

• This is definitely a first-person RPG, rather than a stealth game or an action game. Of all the games I’ve played, the closest one I can think of is Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. It’s a very talky game with lots of things to read and a rich storyline.

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SpaceChem is a game that I’ve been wanting to write about for a long, long time. The reason it has taken so long is that it is such a hard, hard game to complete. I still can’t beat the final level, even after looking at online guides! I spent months on this game on and off but I’d bet it might take years for some people to master all of the user-uploaded levels. This is a game with seriously long legs but it will also give you agonizingly painful headaches.

This is a puzzle game centered around fake chemical engineering. A typical level represents an assignment in which you need to produce a certain number of a specific molecule. Molecules are composed of atoms and you manipulate them using waldoes. The gameplay consists of building the rail network over which these waldoes run, effectively designing a production system that will transform the input you’re given into the output that the level requires. This involves moving atoms around, bonding or unbonding atoms from each other, fusing atoms of one element to transform them to those of another element and much, much more.

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This is a standalone DLC for Alan Wake. It’s smaller in scope and shorter than I expected. It also brings with it a change of tone. This one is all about fighting as opposed to the original’s strong focus on atmosphere and survival horror.

• Story-wise it does at least go somewhere, unlike the two actual DLC to the base game. Alan Wake carries out his plan to return to the real world by inserting himself into a story about Night Springs and turning a small town in Arizona in the real world into Night Springs for his purposes. It’s a pretty cool way of imagining a way to escape the dream-like Dark Place. The antagonist this time around is Mr. Scratch, the doppelganger of Wake that can travel at will between the Dark Place and the real world and seems to be embodiment of Wake’s dark side.

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Legend of Grimrock is an old-school dungeon-delving RPG. Think Ultima Underworld, Eye of the Beholder and even Stonekeep. You control a group of four adventurers, that true to the conventions of this particular sub-genre, always move together in a tight group and can only ever face the same direction. Your job is simply to survive all levels of the dungeon which naturally is filled with all manner of monsters, traps and locked doors.

• This game is serious about being old-school. There’s only a very minimal tutorial about how the game works and almost no explanation for the magic and alchemy system at all. Magic works by stringing runes together and you can either discover spells by experimenting with combinations of runes or find spell scrolls which tell you the right combination. The same goes with alchemy. There’s even a mode that disables auto-mapping so you’ll have to draw maps on your own by hand. But that’s way too hardcore for me.

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Like L.A. Noire which I played recently, Alan Wake is one of those games that had a very long gestation. They are also similar in how they strive to be video game versions of other media. The former tried to emulate noir films. This one tries to feel like a television show, specifically one of them in particular, Twin Peaks.

• Right from the start, this game pulled me in and never let go. I’m especially pleased with the basic premise of being a writer who travels to the quintessential American small town with many secrets. It’s a standard trope in other entertainment media, but appears only rarely in videogames. I also liked how the game put you in environments that you don’t often see in videogames, a bright and cheery waterfront, a diner, a trailer park etc. It all feels very fresh and engaging.

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The third installment of the Saints Row franchise is so over the top and so contemptuous of anything resembling consistency or coherence, it’s hard to decide whether to love it or hate it. I mean the previous games were always pretty crazy, this is after all the series that let you vandalize buildings by spraying excrement on them and earn money by letting cars ram into you. But this installment really turns the craziness dial up to eleven. It doesn’t just throw realism out of the window, it takes an everything including the kitchen sink approach, ignoring genres. Plus it never lets up on the excitement. Just when you think things can’t get any crazier, the game escalates again and then escalates some more. By the end of the game, the entire city becomes a total war zone.

• The game starts with an extended action scene that ends with the player falling from an aircraft. While you’re falling through the air, you’re expected to fight off multiple enemies, catch and drop a homie, intercept and wreck an aircraft and catch that same homie again. The protagonist even wonders idly, “Is the ground even close yet?” Yeah, it’s that kind of game.

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Evochron Mercenary is an indie-produced open-world space-fighter sim. This the genre that Elite once pioneered and championed by such great games as Privateer but that big game studios have neglected. Like many others I have my eye on Chris Roberts’ Star Citizen, but I’d bought this some time back and thought that this would whet my appetite.

• This is a fairly hardcore game. The emphasis is on the flight sim part. You only get to pilot fairly small fighters and only one of these at a time, so it’s a lot less ambitious in that sense than the X series. Trading seems pretty desultory in this game since each port of call only has a very small selection of trade goods and there’s no good way to track prices across different ports. Noncombat activities include mining, cleaning solar arrays (really!) and racing but most players will probably spend their time fighting or exploring.

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