Game EXP: POOLS (VSD)

 [Disclaimer:  I received a review key for POOLS through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]

POOLS

Release Date: April 26, 2024

Systems: OS non-specific, Windows 10 or later

Publisher: Tensori

Developer: Tensori

Time Spent: 101 minutes 

Before we get into POOLS, I wanted to acknowledge the similarities between this game and a demo I played and reviewed last month, Dreamcore where you played from a first-person perspective as you walked through interconnected rooms filled with pools, playing on the fear and uneasiness of liminal spaces.  I genuinely thought that this was a standalone version of the same demo, but the developer was different and this was addressed in the discussion pages.  It turns out that this idea of not just empty backrooms, but empty pools has been an explored idea since around 2020 starting with Jared Pike's exploration of an "...eerie nostalgia through endless pool environments."  This specific idea builds off of the 2019 concept of "backrooms," as an image that causes a feeling of unsettledness.  There is another game, Anemoiapolis: Chapter 1 that incorporated the liminal pools along with other backroom settings that have since entered the collective consciousness.  Lastly, there is a collection of "found footage" videos from Matt Studios that looks like it could be recordings of gameplay footage, albeit edited in a way that is more storytelling than aimlessly wandering around while trying to keep Twitch viewers entertained.

What is nice about all of this is that Tensori acknowledges all of these references and sources in a thread on the Steam forums which seems to be a thriving online community of people who are drawn not only to the concept of found footage backroom creepypasta but specifically those having to do with large complexes containing nothing but pools.  Maybe it's not as congenial as all of that, but I like to think that not only is Backrooms a niche form of unsettling horror, but these different takes on backroom pools are an even nichier niche that is fostered by the community.  So it is with all of this in mind that I, pun unintended, jumped into POOLS, my second foray into liminal space pools.

POOLS is on the front, a first-person perspective psychological horror game that explores liminal spaces, but only to a certain extent.  Yes, you play as a person dropped into this space and your goal is to find a way out, or at least, out of your current series of rooms.  The game, or at least the demo of the game since the Steam page titles this as a "demo" and there is a "BETA" watermark in the lower right corner of the game.  One other standout aspect of this game is that each of the four playable stages lasts anywhere between 10-15 minutes, unlike Dreamcore where I literally wandered around for over an hour.  I love that I can start a stage and explore the strangeness of the setting and come to a form of a conclusion in fewer than 30 minutes.

One of the things that stood out to me, but only the third time I played POOLS was a feature that I saw requested on the discussion pages for Dreampools, and that was asking to be able to interact with the waterslides.  Because of my experience with Dreampools' waterslides that you could only look at, I had thought that not only was that a feature of the liminalness of this particular setting, but also a limitation of the engine itself.  In POOLS, however, you can climb on the opening and ride down slides.  I don't know if this goes against any kind of ethos about either the backrooms or the pool setting, but I enjoyed doing more than just walking or running.  Kind of.

The differences in POOLS I found make it a substantially different game.  Apart from being able to slide down accessible slides, there are also more features than I expected.  In one stage/chapter, there were white humanoid statues either standing around or hanging out of pipes/slides in inaccessible locations.  In the same chapter, there were a series of separate and interlocking saunas.  In another stage/chapter, there were several white plastic deck chairs that you could actually sit in.  A chair existing in a water-filled hallway was unnerving, but being able to sit in one felt a little silly.  Walking through a darkened room and into a room filled with lockers, another familial place associated with pools, again took a bit of the shiver away.  Having a change in scenery apart from the nearly monotonous white tile and water-filled pools offered almost a palette cleanser, nearly breaking up what makes these games about liminal spaces so unsettling.  That would have to be my only criticism because while it is original to have different elements in your game to help it stand out, there is a risk of becoming too far from the original intention of the game and ending up with something slightly different.  

The first two stages feel traditional if the genre of backroom pools is solidified enough for it to have a tradition at this point, backroom pools with multiple hallways through various rooms, and empty swimming pools with the occasional darkened passageway or room.  The second stage is also where the mechanic of actually being able to use the colorful slides happens, although because of my past experience with Dreamcore, I had thought that the slides were non-functioning and purely aesthetic.  Maybe if there had been a visual indication that slides could be used in an obvious manner, like wet footprints leading up to one it might help when players bring pre-conceived notions into a game.  The upside I found to using slides was that since they are one-way use, they are likely supposed to be used as opposed to dropping you in a room that you could otherwise not escape from.

The third stage is really where changes really start happening.  Maybe because you start off in a darkened room with black tiles and a blackened-green glow to the lights, but it all felt extra-terrestrial, I have read that one theory for the backrooms genre is that they are places created by aliens who don't fully understand Earthly architecture and you, the player, are part of some "rat in a maze" type experiment.  This stage also introduced wood-paneled saunas complete with a massive sauna stone, which made me furrow my brow more than anything.  I did really like when the screen became a bit steamy and water droplets started to condense and drip down the screen.  I did have to lighten my screen up a bit while wandering through a section of interconnecting wood-paneled rooms, after which the stage ended shortly thereafter.

[Just a heads up, that the next section contains spoilers that I thought were very cool, but I can't talk about how this stage was different and thereby how the game was different without talking about it.  So if you want to remain spoiler-free, you can skip the next paragraph.]

The fourth stage was probably the strangest and most gamey of the collection, which I mean in both a good and bad sense.  Let's start with the bad.  The primary mechanic in this stage is that you follow a shimmering light through the level to get to the end.  It's a very fuzzy kind of light that gives off a different kind of light than both the ambient natural light and the illuminated light domes scattered throughout the rest of the game.  It's easily recognizable so that you know where to go when you see it emanating through a hallway on the other side of a room.  I say this is bad because it felt like it went against the very premise of a liminal space, but only if you are a liminal space purist.  What I loved about this light though was that I felt it was executed well in the first room so you knew what you were supposed to do since it opens up a door that previously had only been a wall and allows you to progress deeper into the stage.  The light would also send out a visual pulse which you could also help figure out which way to go.  What was really awesome, was that because I was playing with the Nintendo Switch Pro controller, there was a slight rumble functionality whenever the pulse would pass through you.  I didn't notice any other rumblings for the rest of the game, so this was a very nice surprise.

[End of spoiler].

I really enjoyed POOLS, both as a game that explores liminal spaces, but also as a game that successfully implemented more conventional video game mechanics.  It had moments of uncomfortableness, but then I found the fourth stage to be a lot of fun because of the new mechanic.  I liked that the stages weren't massive complexes that took hours to complete but at the same time, felt immense in their size and complex in their construction.  I liked that Tensori wasn't afraid to change up the conventional idea of a liminal space video game, while not including a monster/creature that you either had to fight or run away from; which is honestly one of my biggest turn-offs to Escape the Backrooms and Inside the Backrooms.  I'm interested to see what the remaining two stages are like and if any more will be added to the full game after it's released later next month.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
So I Won't Be Alone

P.S.  Below you can find links to three of the four playable chapters; Stage 2 I played on the Steam Deck and only after I watched the recording, did I realize that I didn't record the audio:

1. Stage 1 I played on my laptop.
2. Stage 3 I played on the Steam Deck but recorded through my laptop and used a Switch Pro controller.
3. Stage 4 I played on the Steam Deck but recorded through my laptop and used a Switch Pro controller.

MIDI Week Singles: "Underwater BGM" - New Super Mario Bros. Wii (Wii)

 

"Underwater BGM"* from Super Mario Bros. Wii on the Nintendo Wii & Nvidia Shield TV (2009)

Composers: Shiho Fujii, Ryo Nagamatsu, Kenta Nagata

Album: No Official Release

Publisher: Nintendo

Developer: Nintendo EAD

I never played Super Mario Bros. Wii and I'm now just kind of realizing that this game and New Super Mario Bros. U on the Wii U and New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe on the Switch are all two different games with two different, albeit at times similar soundtracks.  But what I really like about this track are four specific things.  

First, at 0:04, after the intro, is that the first three notes immediately invoke both the underwater variant of the "Overworld BGM" from Super Mario World.  There is an automatic feeling of nostalgia for that game that was released 19 years earlier.  Second, the song is in the form of a waltz, something that the original Super Mario Bros. established as an ideal meter for an underwater stage.  Maybe that was why the underwater theme from New Super Mario Bros. U, "Sparkling Waters" didn't grab me like this song does.  Thirdly, the use of marimbas, played in this way (or at least through the mixing process) purposefully sounds like bubbles, again to draw on the underwater environment, maybe to maintain that the music is also a part of the environment.  Lastly, there is the jingly/"bling" sound that plays to which several of the enemies on screen react/dance/spin to.  This all just creates a cohesiveness between past Super Mario Bros. games, the music, and the environment that I really enjoy.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Dead Rivers

*P.S.  Since there was no official soundtrack, I wasn't sure what the name of this particular song was.  A lot of YouTube videos have this titled "Swimming," but a couple of videos also had "Swimming" as the title for the underwater music from Super Mario World and Super Mario Bros., and I know that that song is titled "Underwater BGM."  So I figured why mess with a perfect title and decided to use that instead.

Demo Time: While We Wait Here (VSD)

While We Wait Here

Release Date: TBD

Systems: Windows, Linux, macOS, Steam OS, (64 bit Operating Systems)

Publisher: Bad Vices Games

Developer: Bad Vices Games

Time Spent: 37 Minutes

I had debated if I wanted to mention anything about the apocalypse or the end of the world out of fear of spoiling anything, but it says on the front of the store page "Share thoughts and hot food with your last-ever clients, as you wait for the world to end," so it's right out there, but I won't say exactly how the end of the world factors into the actual story.

I think I had higher hopes going into this game even though what I played was intriguing in the way that had me asking, "I wonder what that was about" after the demo was over.  While We Wait Here is all played in the first-person perspective as you work behind the counter at a truck stop diner.  Most of the time was spent listening to other people's conversations with other characters and periodically doing tasks around them and occasionally for them.  The design and look of the characters were not realistic in the way that characters are in God of War: Ragnarok or even Skyrim, but came across a little cartoony; like something similar to Timesplitters, with some semblance of the character's physical appearance slightly out of proportion and their movements exaggerated in the way only achievable in video games.  While I was initially, not "put off" as I think that's too strong, maybe "disenthused?" by the character design, it did help set the tone for the rest of the demo.

The voice acting, something that I can't really feature in a written article, stood out to me, and not in a great way.  I don't mean that the voice acting was bad, and this is coming from someone who is overly critical about the way that I sound in terms of my own recorded voice, didn't sound overly convincing.  The sheriff (I actually don't know if he's a sheriff, but he came across as sheriff-like)in the scene (as above) Hank, kind of sounded like a caricature of how you would stereotype a midwest rural sheriff who shoots first and files the paperwork the following month.  Later in the demo, there was a woman named Mandy who was what you might conjure when you think of a country girl who returns home after making it in Hollywood, and by making it, I mean filmed a couple of side characters in a few pilots (maybe one of them aired) and a handful of commercials but still sees herself as better than those who didn't make it out, but in a friendly sort of way.

While a lot of these interactions are going on with the characters in the diner, including your coworker Nora, you at first are unable to do anything but look around.  I tried moving to see what was available as far as actions go and what else I could interact with, but your playable character was forced to remain motionless.  Even after you become mobile, it is only for scripted events, like getting a customer a drink or gathering the supplies to make a hamburger.  Once you complete a task, you remain motionless again while the dialogue carries on, mostly around you and with other characters while you just stand there.  In this respect, the demo (and presumably the game too) feels more like a visual novel that you can move around in, which isn't a bad thing as that's one of my biggest hangups with visual novels.

While the game describes itself as a choose-your-own-adventure since you make decisions that supposedly will affect the storyline, the effects of those decisions never felt present in the demo and so what felt like an integral mechanic came across as fruitless. Along with the restaurant management and cooking-sim portion of the game, there were only a handful of decisions and cooking scenarios that occurred, again that felt like they were inserted to give the player something to do while the story unfolded around them.  Maybe to give the player a small taste (sorry) about how the cooking mechanic operates in the full game so you're not overwhelmed while trying to follow the dialogue behind you while not trying to burn a burger (which cooks in literal seconds) and knowing that you still need to use the register to check out customers before they get angrier or possibly dash out before paying their bill.

I like the premise of operating a diner while the apocalypse is happening outside and around you, but how the game's mechanics unfolded in this demo just didn't really do it for me and I was put off a bit more than I thought I would be by the voice acting.  There was one scene at the end of the demo that reminded me a little of the end of the short story, "A City of Churches" where the narrator is told that they have to stay in this city because all of the accommodations have already been made so there's no reason for them to leave.  It wasn't so much what was happening in the game that made me shiver so much as remembering "A City of Churches," which probably isn't the best takeaway.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see how the final game comes about, likely sometime later this year, because while I really like the premise, I wasn't excited by the execution.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental

Old Man Yells At LEGO Clouds

We're taking a short break in our regular Demo Time articles today just because, to throw a little salt and Mentolatum in the mix.

There was a recent interview with Hasbro (the parent company that owns Wizards of the Coast and thereby, the Dungeons & Dragons and Magic the Gathering IPs) CEO Chris Cocks lamenting that they can't get any more money out of their customers after they've purchased either a physical book or a pack of cards.  I say this because I don't know how much of a royalty cut Hasbro gets from the sale each time they lease one of their IPs to anything from a cereal, video game, or a new 3,745-piece LEGO set retailing for $359.99.

First off, I am not saying that the number of pieces, the amount of time it took to create and finalize the design, or the amount of time it took for writers to write a "short" standalone adventure, Red Dragon's Tale, are not all worth $359.99.  The set does look pretty incredible both in its detail and the execution.  There are also a lot of unique minifigures, which I know is a huge draw for collectors and a reason behind higher prices.  The set is also marketed for ages 18+, so it's not likely that your everyday eight-year-old is going to be buying this set.  

This isn't the 664-piece King's Castle that a certain six-year-old received for Christmas in the mid-1980s (which the Internet tells me retailed for $52.75 when it was released in 1984).  Or even the Forestmen's River Fortress from 1989 that sold for a whopping $37.50 with 357 pieces.  Some of where I'm coming at with this article is from a point of jealousy, I recognize that, if that wasn't already obvious, for several reasons.  First, is that I don't have $360 lying around to drop on one LEGO set.  Second, there isn't a place in our house where this set would fit.  And lastly, we have an almost-four-year-old who loves LEGOs and there is a zero percent chance that unless I built that set in my office at work, there will be dozens of missing pieces either during the construction or within five minutes of its completion.

Which then opens up another can of worms.  With these licensed LEGO sets from STAR WARS, Super Mario Bros., Animal Crossing, Minecraft, and Harry Potter (Media Bias Check), has the target audience for these particular LEGO sets now become the villainous Dad from The LEGO Movie in wanting sets to be permanent or semi-permanent (e.g. without using the Kragle)?  Does the Super Mario LEGO set still hold the same level of interest when it's in a hundred pieces that no longer resemble Level 1-1? Are we become Will Ferrell?

But the main reason that I am writing the poor diatribe of brain vomit nonsense is that I am annoyed that this is the first official Dungeons & Dragons LEGO set released.  I get it though.  It's all about spectacle and this is certainly that.  LEGO has teased images with other, smaller builds such as the Mimic Chest*, but to release an entire line at such a high price point I find it off-putting. D&D and LEGO have always felt they would be perfect. I know, anecdotally, that people have been using LEGO figures instead of Warhammer/Reaper miniatures for decades now. Still, I feel that releasing a handful of smaller sets between a $5.99 -$39.99 price point before releasing something on this scale would be more digestible.  LEGO could even take the pre-painted figure randomized route and release blind box/polybag sets for $6 that include a small setting and a random D&D figure and a small/medium-sized monster; which it looks like they'll be doing something along these lines in September.  Similar to what this creator did, minus the Red Dragon, because that's way too large to include in a $7-$10 box.  And then there's the modular Dwarven Forge approach, although I feel that the rooms here are too cluttered to be functional outside of a diorama.  Maybe I'm just missing the point altogether?

*[After this article was finished, I found out that the Mimic Chest, at least for now, will only be included as a "thank you" gift of sorts to people who buy the "Red Dragon's Tale" and even then, only a limited number are being produced, likely to create that FOMO effect that companies love to bank on.  And that shit works.]

I think I also get annoyed with some of these LEGO Ideas voting poll creations where someone creates a 2,498-piece set that, while looking gorgeous and wonderfully detailed, would likely cost upwards of $300+.  Sure, there's a market for massively detailed sets, otherwise LEGO wouldn't have a cap of 3,000 pieces for their LEGO Idea creation submissions and they wouldn't've put out so many of them.  But I think that separate from the individual creator's description, there should be a tab that shows how much the set would cost, as generated by LEGO that could not be altered by the creator unless they alter/change the specific pieces used.  Or maybe have a price cap, where your submissions can only contain X number of pieces up to an estimated MSRP of $49.99 and use that as a ceiling.  Or I guess I could also just unsubscribe from the LEGO Idea Creator emails letting me know that this cool project just got over 10,000 votes and moves on to the next step to possibly become an official LEGO set.

That's it for me now as I think I heard some whippersnappers rustlin' out on muh lawn.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

The Eyes Hollow With Ignorance

P.S.  Or jeebzus, there's the Rivendell set, with 6,167 pieces for $499.99 which pales in comparison to the Venator Class Republic Attack Cruiser which has 793 fewer pieces at 5,374 for $649.99, which pales in comparison to the Millennium Falcon which has 7,541 pieces, for $849.99.  The moral of the story here is that STAR WARS LEGOS can be fucktastically expensive.

P.P.S.  AI image generative technology was used to create the cloud that Grandpa Simpson is yelling at because my big box of LEGOS has been sitting in my parent's garage for the past 24 years and I wasn't able to create a cloud with the LEGOs that are currently at my disposal.  The Grandpa Simpson image was taken from S13 E13 of The Simpsons, "The Old Man and the Key."  All other edits were made manually using MS Paint.

MIDI Week Singles: "Music 2" - Tetris (NES)

 

"Music 2" from Tetris on the Nintendo Entertainment System (1989)
Composer: Hirokazu "Hip" Tanaka
Album: No Official Release
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo R&D 1, Alexey Pajitnov

"Music 2" from Tetris is a bit of an outlier between the NES and Game Boy releases.  Hirokazu Tanaka wrote the original music and arrangements for both games, but "Music 2" is the only in-stage music featured in both games.  "Dance of the Sugar Plumb Fairies" was "Music 1" on the NES version while "Korobeinki" was "Music A" on the Game Boy. The third respective songs, "Music 3" and "Music C" were original compositions from Tanaka and while they had similar vibes, they were both different songs.

Because I am neither a musicologist, a music historian, or someone who has a major in Russian Folk Music, I feel only a little bad/guilty for saying that something about "Music 2" just feels like a traditional Russian folk song, or at least composed by someone familiar with Russian music tropes.  On a different note, I also felt bad since I often skipped over "Music 2" despite liking it because I thought the sped-up version was difficult to listen to.  When your blocks reached a certain height, the music became too frantic and got under my skin, making me panic even more than I already was.  But I still enjoy "Music 2" as a song by itself, likely more outside of the context of Tetris than actual in-game music, but that's something too.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental

Demo Time: SILKBULB TEST (VSD)

 

SILKBULB TEST

Release Date: TBD

Systems: Windows

Publisher: oxblud

Developer: Tim Oxton

Time Spent: 38 Minutes

I don't know how best to describe SILKBULB TEST.  A horror testing simulator maybe?  There is a multiple-choice test and a couple of times when the game gives you a score.  You can move your head to look around the room but you cannot physically move, either because that's not part of the game and test, or because your character is restrained except for their hands.

From what I could tell, SILKBULB TEST exists to make you feel uncomfortable while telling some kind of story.  Like reading SCP entries in the dark at 3 AM while sitting in your underwear in the kitchen surrounded by half-finished glasses of apple juice, one of which contains three of your teeth.  If this were a VR game, I would likely shit myself with a 53% chance of having a heart attack within the first 7 minutes.

SILKBULB TEST puts you in the role of a person sitting at a table with two buttons marked A and B in front of them and you answer questions by pressing either of the buttons in response to the slides that are projected on the screen in front of you.  The screen and buttons are positioned in a way that you cannot see and/or press the buttons while looking at the screen, which has to be a deliberate mechanic choice because there are times when there are changes to the environment while you are either looking at the screen or looking down at the buttons.  There is even a slide that says "Don't look down" and your response is with either of the buttons to progress the slides.

There is then a series of slides that ask you to agree or disagree with a statement, such as, "This is an image of a door," "This is an image of a person," or "This is a stranger."  You then have five seconds to press one of the corresponding buttons.  I found this difficult the two times I played the game, once on the Steam Deck and thinking that I might have better luck with a mouse instead of the Steam Deck's trackpad.  On the Steam Deck, I never felt that I could be as quick and as precise as I wanted to be, either overshooting the button or accidentally hitting the wrong one.  My laptop was something else as I was only able to run the game on low graphical settings and still maxed out at 8 fps, so moving the cursor was the very definition of sluggish.  Five seconds is a very short time to read a question, have your brain register the image, then physically move the camera down to click the correct button, let alone a sequence of buttons, then look up in time to see the next slide/question before you again hear the ticking of the clock.

There are several scripted elements that I experienced that was very unnerving, although by the end, before my test ended, the tension and fear that I had felt were replaced by frustration.  In the end, I was asked to press a combination such as "A B A A B B B" within a certain amount of time or something creepy would happen; I'll leave that out.  You then had to enter another combination while looking down but if you didn't, something creepy would happen to completion and you would have to start this portion of the test all over again.  After the third time failing because of hitting the wrong combination of A/B, I was no longer afraid, just annoyed because it didn't feel like failing was an intentional part of the mechanic.  There might have been one more attempt at pressing the buttons in the correct sequence and then I essentially got a game over.  I was both relieved because I could no longer be frightened and because I wouldn't have to sit through a sequence that felt impossible and frustrating.

The Steam page for SILKBULB TEST says that it is a cooperative game although the single-player demo gives no hint as to how.  The page does specify that the "...demo should be considered an introduction and early tutorial to the world and is not representative of the gameplay for the full game."  There is also mention of a mechanic called a customizable "Safe-T Face" that alerts you to things that are just beyond your sight and look absolutely terrifying.  Developer Tim Oxton does have another game available titled Future Racer 2000 that looks to be in a similar vein although a completely different delivery device.  I greatly appreciate too that the page says that Future Racer 2000 is only a 30-40 minute experience, so I wouldn't be surprised if SILKBULB TEST has a similar length and price, although maybe increased a bit on both counts due to inflation.  Or something.

I am very much intrigued by what the final SILKBULB TEST will look and play like, if only because I want to know how this demo is incorporated into the story and the lore and just what the blazes are going on and why.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
With A Lesson Fully Dreadful

Game EXP: Frontiers Reach - Part 2 (VSD)

 [Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Frontiers Reach through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]

Frontiers Reach
Release Date: March 1, 2023
Systems: Windows, Linux, Steam OS
Publisher: Blind Alien Productions
Developer: Blind Alien Productions
Time Spent: 7h 20m

Welcome back to Part 2 of our review for Frontiers Reach from Blind Alien Productions.  Part 1 was published on Monday, March 11th, and covered the initial installation and playing of the game while running the tutorial mission on the Steam Deck.  My next handful of attempts were all the "Instant Action" option because the tutorial mission was becoming frustrating with the game freezing either after crashing too many times, or somehow failing and then being stuck in the hangar.  I had tried to "Load Pilot" and create a "New Pilot" with nothing productive happening with either. I could proceed through the New Pilot creation but I couldn't enter a name, even when manually pulling up the keyboard (Steam Button + X), so it was "Instant Action" for me.

Compared to what I later played in the story mode, there were no customization options in Instant Action, which was fine as I just wanted to play something more than the tutorial.  Here you are thrown into an automatically outfitted ship with a predetermined weapons loadout which, from what I could tell every time, was a generic and non-descript mission with only "Good Luck" as your guide.  I quickly learned that the majority of the time I would be flying around haphazardly until I found something with a green target box around it, flew towards it, and then missiles and gunned my way until I ended up crashing enough times that the game eventually "froze" when I was in the hangar.  And I mean "froze" in the same way the game was still running, there was background animation and audio, but I could not press pause to exit to the main menu and the game didn't automatically take me back to the main menu; except for one session where it did end the mission and took me back to the main menu but I don't know what I could have done and I could not repeat it on subsequent playthroughs.  These green-boxed target missions I would later be almost identical to the opening story mission where you shoot at and destroy stationary land-based targets while on a planet; I specify planet because except for one Instant Mission on Monday, March 11th, every mission I have attempted have all been planet based, but more on that later.

After playing a handful of Instant Action missions, crashing both in terms of my ships and the game, I finally discovered the gear icon in the upper left of the screen and was able to change the screen resolution to 1280 x 720 @ 60Hz which finally allowed me to see the entire screen on the menus.  I also lowered the General Quality from Ultra down to Medium, lowered the Shadow rendering down to Low, lowered the Cloud Quality slider by about a quarter, and turned the texture distance to about 60%, but left the terrain texture close to 90%.  These combinations of changes drastically increased my frame rate from bottoming out between 1-8 fps down to a more reasonable 20-30 fps with frequent drops down to 12, but still very much playable; although there were times when the frame rate dropped to 0 for a second or two, thankfully that never led to any crashes; None of the videos or screenshots show the performance settings overlay that you can turn on/off on the Steam Deck.

So now while the graphical settings allowed for smoother gameplay, I still was unable to figure out how or why the game was freezing after crashing three times with the ship just sitting on the launch pad in the hangar.  It didn't also help that after I was able to finally create a pilot profile (apparently the "hitbox," for lack of a better term, to click and enter your name is wonderfully small), I found that I was horrible at the starting mission that is supposed to familiarize you beyond what is in the tutorial.  I was also less interested in the story where you attack a planet-based pirate outpost and just try to hit small green boxes with even smaller text in a not-at-all-easy-to-read green font as you blast by.  Only after hours of attempts over several days did I finally make it past the "attack the pirates" and had two ships left to try and fly through a cave where I crashed twice while trying to enter the said cave; video from last Saturday; yes, I know there's no audio.

So now we have three options in terms of playing Frontiers Reach.  The most interesting for me and engaging is the tutorial.  The combination of a story that directly involves you and your family along with primarily airborne antagonists which I find a lot easier to engage with on planet-based missions meant that I was having more fun and eventually longer play sessions where I could go without crashing for 20+ minutes.  The problem with the tutorial was that I was frequently failing somehow because my video game space Dad would say "I'm sorry," but I could never figure out why.  I thought it was related to failing to protect the rover that was transporting my space Mom and space Brother, but I cannot confirm that is what was happening.  And the fact that it was always happening right after the second not-mother ship was landing made it feel scripted, but in a poor way.  And this was confirmed by the developer, that the mission just ends there.

The second option was to play the actual first story mission, but due to the overall difficulty in trying to aim at small targets with inaccurate-feeling munitions (and missiles that wouldn't target, possibly because they're not air to land missiles, which I might have to look into now that I think about it) and frequent crashes (both the ship and the game) left me feeling frustrated and less engaged.  I get the idea of wanting to attack pirates to keep your community safe, but I didn't feel like there was any reason behind this specific attack.  There was no investment like the tutorial, or if there is, it doesn't happen until after you're supposed to fly through a cave with a very narrow opening.  And then there's the petty/lazy side of me that is annoyed that you have to go through the opening dialogue between your character and the First Mate every time you restart.  It just felt like more work that I didn't want to deal with after failing.

The last option is Instant Action, which on some level is nice to have a randomized level, there might even be more randomization as you unlock more ships than the two that you start off with, but this felt like there was even less connection to anything going on.  You launch from the hangar without any direction or clue on what you are supposed to be doing.  The mission status on your HUD simply says "Good Luck" (I hear ROB 64's voice in my head every time).  I know I sound contradictory when I praise the lack of story to just get you in the air to fight off some bad guys while also saying that there doesn't feel like there's enough here to maintain interest especially since all of the missions felt like they were modeled after the first mission, aka, destroy these targets on a stationary platform on a planet.

And then Monday night happened and I played a mission in space and not one relegated to the planet side, a lot of the game has clicked with me.  The controls feel more natural while navigating in three dimensions without worrying about gravity or the ground.  There were still the same issues I had above, that I didn't know what I was supposed to be looking for beyond a green target, and even then, I think the game might've glitched because I flew around an asteroid space station for nearly eight minutes while looking for whatever my red arrow target indicator was pointing me towards.  But I did engage with two separate pairs of enemy ships which was somewhat fun even if at times it was difficult to find what I was supposed to be targeting.

So that's where we are with Frontiers Reach.  The most engaging part of the game ends in such an abrupt way that I feel that I've failed.  The main mission feels overly difficult, and the play now option lacks direction and oftentimes feels like a reskin of the main mission.  I feel that I can tell what it is that Blind Alien Productions is going for in terms of what they want Frontiers Reach to be.  The design of the ships looks like you're flying some combination of planes  Vietnam-era Air Force hangar from the future, and there is what feels like an insane attention to detail even if I know I'm missing a lot of it because realistic (albeit retro-futuristic) flights sims are not my go-to choice and I'm playing on a 7-inch 1280p touchscreen.  There is also a fair amount of world-building told through the text of the loading screens and in conversations with other crew members in the Galley that I am interested in, which I know I haven't touched on, but that gets lost in everything I've said above.  The developer feels like they take player feedback well having made various changes to the game since its first early release and launch including adding a first-person cockpit view and tweaking level/mission elements to make them more intuitive.  I might jump back in every so often to see what has changed with the game, but right now, I just don't feel as engaged with any of my options to play on a regular basis.  I want to like this game more than I do, and while that makes me a little sad, it's a hopeful kind of sad.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
You Know I Am A Gambling Man

MIDI Week Singles: "Destroyer" - Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth (PC)

 

"Destroyer" from Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth on Windows, mac OS, Linux, Steam OS (2014)
Composer: Geoff Knorr
Album: Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth (Original Soundtrack from the Video Game)
Label: 2K
Publisher: 2K Games
Developer: Firaxis Games

I decided to use "Destroyer" sandwiched between our two articles for Frontiers Reach because when I was first making a trailer, I had this song in mind and actually made a short trailer.  A week or two ago when the Squire asked what a video was on my computer, I said it was "a boring video I made," thinking that he wouldn't want to watch it.  We now watch "the weird boring video you made Daddy" three to four times in a row nearly every morning.  I then made a longer video using the entirety of "Destroyer" so that both Conklederp and I wouldn't have to listen to the same 25 seconds over and over and over again.

Just like the first time we used music from Beyond Earth, I still haven't played the game and have zero context for its use in the game, but it does come pretty early in the soundtrack so my headcanon has taken that into account too.  The scene I conjure is a combination of a lone ship escaping an armada of aggressive ships and/or an entire planet entry sequence full of questioning and fearful looks without any dialogue.  However this song is used in-game, I just love how unabashedly dramatic it is, and that's it.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Pass Judgement on Humanity

Game EXP: Frontiers Reach - Part 1 (VSD)

  [Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Frontiers Reach through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]

Frontiers Reach
Release Date: March 1, 2023
Systems: Windows, Linux, Steam OS
Publisher: Blind Alien Productions
Developer: Blind Alien Productions
Time Spent: 5h 18m

Before we get to the actual gameplay of Frontiers Reach, let's delve a bit into the process of getting the game to play on the Steam Deck.  But before we even get there, we have to acknowledge that developer Blind Alien Productions (Soliloquis) has stated on the Steam discussion pages that when playing Frontiers Reach in Linux, users should beware.  Not being entirely knowledgeable about all that is entailed in Linux, some of what Soliloquis mentioned went over my head, but the takeaway from what they were saying was that playing on the Steam Deck was not going to be as stable as playing on a higher-end PC. 

That was another thing, that Frontiers Reach is hardware intensive.  Soliloquis goes into various descriptions about advised hardware in the discussion pages, again, some of which I didn't fully understand.  I took all of this to mean that I shouldn't even try running in on my laptop out of fear of starting a low-level chemical fire.  So the Steam Deck it was.  At first.  And only for a short moment.

Come with me on this journey.

Once I booted up the game, the first thing that stuck out to me was that the "Escape to Skip" text on the opening story was cropped.  Then the opening menu was cropped too, and while I should have noticed the gear icon in the upper left corner of the screen, I missed it and just read about needing to have Nvidia Physx installed.  I then found that while I could move the cursor around on the screen, I couldn't select anything with either the A button or the RT, or really any other button.  I should also note that there was no video playing on the video screen, which I didn't notice this time around because I didn't know any different.  So after shutting down the game via the Steam menu, I tried again with the same result.  I then went into the compatibility settings and selected "Proton Experimental" having had good luck with it in the past.  Now, the game booted up the same as before, the screens were still cropped, but I was able to click around to actually start playing.  Sort of.  I should note that in the actual levels, from what I could tell, the screen was at the correct resolution, so I figured I could live with a cropped menu screen for the time being.

When I clicked "New Pilot" it would bring up a menu to create a character, and I could select from several character background traits, but I could not actually name my character since wherever I clicked would not bring up the Steam keyboard and even when I brought it up manually, nothing happened when I typed.  So I tried "Play Tutorial" which only made sense.  Here you start out as the kid of a farmer about to make a crop dusting run as your Dad goes over a preflight safety check, which works somewhat well as a quick rundown on the the cockpit if you're in cockpit mode.  Then the settlement you live in is attacked and you're sent out to defend the surrounding area.  And then flight controls became an issue from that point until the present day.  Yes, the Y-axis is properly inverted (unless you're looking around in the cockpit with the right joystick, then its regular up is up, down is down).

What I found to be a coordination problem for me was that while down was up and up was down (as it should be for camera controls, especially in flight sims, but that's just personal preference), but left/right made the plane roll in their respective directions.  I've played several flight sims in the Ace-Combat franchise where there is a "simplified flight controls" option that allows for easier turning of the plane and there is automatic roll/pitch/yaw handling by the game unless you hold down a button for immediate use.  What I found difficult about this configuration was that to turn the plane to the left, you need to roll the plane almost 90 degrees and then pull up, all while flying around the mid-high subsonic range.  This made making small adjustments to the plane while trying to focus on stationary targets exceedingly difficult.  Part of me feels like a jerk complaining about this because it does make sense that that is what a plane would need to do to perform a turn, but because this is a video game, albeit a flight-sim, I was not prepared for this steep of a learning curve on just the tutorial mission.  This early on, after only a few minutes, I got the impression that this was a game that was developed by and for people who either already have a Thrustmaster HOTAS set-up or someone who could afford one as an accessory.

Thankfully in the tutorial though, your primary focus is on moving targets, other enemy aircraft, although there are flak guns that no one mentions or apparently wants you to concern yourself with even though after respawning, my ship had about 20% of its armor diminished by the time I took off after being peppered by enemy gunfire from all directions.  Maybe this was my all fault because I didn't take out enough of the enemy fighters so they all converged on me when they saw a helpless ship wheel out of the hanger.  Maybe it's just a Souls-like penalty for dying and respawning with less health until I learned to git gud.  Whatever the reason, it felt realistic, but also unfair and I was not a fan.

Lastly, after my final time crashing and respawning in the hangar, there was an announcement that stated in more eloquent and lore-appropriate terminology, that I had failed the mission.  I then sat with the ship still inside the hanger waiting for a "Try Again" or "You Died" or "You Failed" screen, but nothing.  The game was still running, the ship was still sitting in the hangar and I could rotate the camera enough to see structures burning off in the distance.  I tried pausing to bring up any kind of a menu, but nothing happened.  Not quite a freeze, and not quite a game crash, but something in between that required me to force exit the game by opening the Steam menu and closing the game.  This became a running theme for all but one time I played which we will cover in Part 2 on Friday.

So my first foray into Frontiers Reach while as plagued as it was by crashes, freezes, and unfamiliar controls, I still had high hopes for the rest of the game.  Not going into the game expecting everything to run as smoothly as one that's optimized for the Steam Deck definitely helped to curb my enthusiasm throughout and not be disappointed or discouraged.  Okay, maybe a little discouraged, but still hopeful for what we will be bringing you on Friday.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Right After Misbehaving

P.S.  On a side note, I did map the "H" key to the L4 back button on the Steam Deck to remove the HUD, which I ended up doing a lot more when I played the main missions and the "Instant Action" option.