Fish sound fish sound, punch punch jump.... ELDRITCH

Eldritch

The Basics: Lovecraftian 1st Person Rogue-like

Previous Time Spent: 45 minutes

Expectation of learning Curve: low

Why I bought this: Super-cheap steam sale, reviews, lovecraftian elements

First Impressions: Everything looks super blocky, giving it a minecraft feel, movement is quick and feels pretty floaty, and everything is fairly deadly (including the player, I managed to kill myself at one point by throwing a rock at something and having that rock bounce back into me). Monsters are a bit corny and predictable in their behavior, but the fragility of the main character makes any encounter with them a little terrifying. Lastly, this is a very vertical game, and it expects you to be thinking in 3 dimensions, looking for ways to get down, etc.

My 3 hours: Like many roguelikes, this game presents a world that changes slightly each time you die, not allowing for memorization. Eldritch is centered around some kind of mystic library, in which our protagonist enters different worlds through books. The end goal of each book is to travel down several levels and find/grab the soul of a mythos god. This entails exploring a minecrafty map full of Lovecraftian themed monsters, think cultists, fishmen, old ones, and giant penguins. As you go deeper in each world, things get noticeably stranger, with the air being replaced by some kind of breathable fluid, and monsters getting far more terrifying.

In these worlds, the player is aided by a mix of mundane equipment and magic powers which feel very close to the powers in Dishonored. The mundane equipment runs the gamut from the humble rock, dagger and revolver to the more exciting grappling gun, dynamite, or lockpick set. The magic abilities are great, and are bestowed to the player through statues of the great Cthulhu himself. In Eldritch, a player can only have 1 magic power at a time, and there is no way of knowing what you'll acquire from a new statue, so there's an interesting choice to be made any time you run into a statue in the cyclopean depths. I ran into the following powers in my playthroughs: teleportation, super-jumping, shoggoth summoning, and monster charming.

Over the three hours that I played, I only managed to consistently finish one of the three settings open to me, and capture the soul of Dagon. I spent a decent amount of time in a Mountains of Madness themed setting, and an ancient Egyptian/Nyarathotep themed map. Both of which were weird and challenging, although I'll admit to having enjoyed my seemingly endless delve into the penguin and shoggoth filled ice-caverns of death the most. 

My Highlight:  Gaining the ability to teleport, and finding myself actually caring about my character's survival. Finishing the Dagon area with this character before diving into the Mountains of Madness, and eventually dying in my retreat from a Shoggoth in some kind of icy trap.

My Verdict:  Eldritch is a game with simple core systems, a decent amount of challenge, and enough variety to eat up a number of afternoons. I'd recommend it if you don't mind slightly loose movement.

Next post will be on October 9th, where I'll be reviewing Endless Space, a 4x game. produced by the same folks that made the celebrated Endless Legend. 

The Age of Decadence

The Basics: Challenging Roman Themed RPG with old-school (Falloutish) sensibilities

Previous Time Spent: none

Expectation of learning Curve: medium

Why I bought this: Online reviews, (but what really sold me was someone's description of their experience playing as a grifter and totally avoiding combat)

First Impressions: I was blown away by the evocative art for the opening menu, depicting a wasteland watched over by some kind of Roman Centurion, and then very impressed by the options presented in character creation (and of course chose to play a grifter). After playing for an hour or so, realizing that I hadn't drawn a drop of blood, and had weaseled my way through things, I felt like the game was living up to it's potential and was suitably impressed. 

My 3 hours:I played through the beginning of the game as several characters, starting with the aforementioned grifter, and also attempting as an assassin and a mercenary. In doing so, I tried out a few of the main systems of the game: exploration, conversation, choose your own adventure quest bit, and combat. Exploration was pretty well handled, with a decently labeled minimap, and a clear sense of traveling around cities that felt lived in. Conversation was quite detailed, with well written characters, who react to different PCs very differently, giving a sense of interacting with human people with goals instead of static quest givers. 

The game was fairly challenging, as best shown with combat and choose your own adventure style quest lines. As I was warned before trying this game, combat was consistently pretty challenging, and even a trained combatant could pretty easily die when faced with multiple opponents or just by bad luck. This led to a lot of reloading for me. Additionally, many of the quests/situations in the game are handled by choose your own adventure style dialogues which present choices keyed to your character's skills. It looks like the game then tests against skills in the background, and moves the story forward. These could lead to deadly situations very quickly.

I found my character unable to succeed a lot of the time, and eventually feeling like I had to do certain things just in order to survive. I'm of the opinion that this is a feature and not a bug, trying to buck the trend of computer roleplaying game characters who are able to solve any problem that they come across. These characters capabilities are quite limited, and the increasingly poor choices that they have to make in order to survive drove the story along for me. 

My Highlight:  Realizing I had played over 2 hours of a video game without having my character personally draw a single drop of blood. (Which is to say that at some point I'm going to have to finish out the game playing as my grifter).

My Verdict:  If you're a patient nerd with roughly my set of sensibilities (including an abiding love for Ancient Rome as a setting, and a fondness for Fallout 1, 2 and Planecape Torment), and are willing to endure a lot of trial and error, you should definitely give this game a shot on the next steam sale. 

Next post will be on September 25th, where I'll be reviewing Eldritch, a procedurally generated game with Lovecraftian leanings

Enhanced sinning or enhanced divinity with: Divinity Original Sin: Enhanced Edition

The Basics: Action RPG toybox with complex systems

Previous Time Spent: 30 minutes

Expectation of learning Curve: high

Why I bought this: Rave Reviews, especially from Rock Paper Shotgun

First Impressions: The game opens with character creation for a couple of travelling adventurers and gives me a sort of World of Warcraftish feel with big hands, big characters, and a sort of cartoony, larger than life feel. There's a traditional display of D&D derived classes, with a clearly complex and interesting skill system. Me being me, I chose a fire and ice wizard, and got started. My first impression of gameplay was sort of Baldur's Gate meets Diablo in a very colorful tropical setting.

My 3 hours:I played through a sort of tutorial dungeon, and then moved on to just scratching the surface of the main plotline before hitting the three hour mark. 

I really enjoyed the tutorial dungeon, and found it to be a great example of the sort of goofy interplay of systems that makes this game tick. There were plenty of environmental puzzles and traps that corresponded to various types of magic, and could be countered using spells or objects found in the environment. Objects can be moved and destroyed, and there's a gleeful sense of experimentation and hijinks to the whole thing. Generally I felt like if I could think of something to do in the system, it had a response. 

Once I was out of the tutorial dungeon, I'll admit to feeling a bit overwhelmed by choice, which is ultimately a mark in the game's favor. I spent some time investigating main plot stuff, some kind of murder, some problems with the undead, etc. I found myself struggling a bit when it came to these systems, and being happy that this game allows a lot of choice and doesn't hold the player's hand as much as I'd expect in a fairly modern game. I got the sense that I was just scratching the surface of the game system, and that if this had come out during a summer break in my teen years, I'd have dedicated countless hours to mastery. 

My Highlight: Wandering out of the starting town, expecting standard low-level foes, and running into fights that grew to overwhelm me. The need to actually consider fleeing is not something that always comes up in modern games, especially RPGs, and it warmed my crooked little heart to see these cartoonish/beefy heroes falling to overwhelming odds.  

My Verdict: Divinity Original Sin is great, but probably not really in my purview due to it's complexity. I'd recommend it for someone who wants to learn the intricacies of it's system, and see the bizarre antics that can come out of the interplay of magic and other factors. 

Next post will be on September 11th, where I'll be stepping out of my schedule to review Age of Decadence, a Roman themed RPG in the mold of Fallout 1 and 2.