Game EXP: This Way Madness Lies (PC)

Disclaimer:  I received a review copy of This Way Madness Lies from Robert Boyd with Zeboyd Games.  The game was given without the expectation of a positive review, only that we play the game, share that experience however our platform saw fit and create a review of this game to share on social media platforms.  Unless otherwise noted, all pictures and descriptions are from my playthrough of This Way Madness Lies.

 

This Way Madness Lies

Systems: Steam

Release Date: November 10, 2022

Publisher: Zeboyd Digital Entertainment LLC

Developer: Zeboyd Digital Entertainment LLC

Time Spent: 12 hours 26 minutes

This Way Madness Lies is a magical-girl comedic Shakepspearean JRPG from Zeboyd, the developers of Cthulhu Saves Christmas, Cthulhu Saves the World, Breath of Death VII, Cosmic Star Heroine, and Penny Arcade's On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness 3 & 4.  If you have played any of those games, then your experience here will be similar, but if you have not, then buckle up.  I will be honest though, out of the three references and styles this game derives from, I was unfamiliar with the magical-girl aspect, although I am aware of Sailor Moon and that the transformation scenes were specifically referencing that anime.  As far as Shakespeare, while I am not as versed as The Kid, I have seen a handful of Shakespeare's plays both in full form and in condensed form at Renn Faires, as well as several film adaptations over the years; Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing is probably my favorite.  So while I might not have gotten all of the questions correct during Shakespeare trivia, I did know a fair amount of the references.  And as far as JRPGs go, I mean, come on.

This Way Madness Lies follows six girls who are part of a Shakespeare drama club at their local high school, the Stratford-Upon-Avon High Drama Society, where they perform plays by William Shakespeare and in their off time, fight against the Nightmare realm from invading and destroying the continuity in Shakespeare's fictional worlds.  The premise itself is rather silly and even the characters in-game point this out, but the events happening in this game have apparently been happening for a while as the characters confront the invading Nightmare creatures with zeal they have developed before the events in this game.  There is not too much though devoted to how long these attacks on the world of Shakespeare's plays has been happening, but the impression is that it has been going on for some time as a few past adventures are mentioned throughout the game.  Similar to how Cthulhu Saves Christmas was a prequel to the first released Cthulhu Saves the World, I would not be upset about a prequel showing how Imogen and company received their powers and started upon their adventures; but that might be a few years away if at all.

The game is also very classic Zeboyd Games in that a lot of the characters are self-aware that they are characters in a video game and there is a fair amount of fourth-wall breaking.  The writing too is very much in the style of previous games from Zeboyd with witty banter between the characters, the enemy descriptions, and how the game itself interacts with the player.  In This Way Madness Lies there is the added semi-optional mechanic of offering the player a modern translation of semi-Shakespearean English during certain dialogue scenes.  Anytime there is a play being performed or a character from one of Shakespeare's worlds talking, you can, if you want, see a tongue-in-cheek translation of what is being said.  At fist I was a little meh about this mechanic as I felt that I have understood enough Shakepseare to not need a modern translation, but I should have known better because of what game I was playing.  The translation is not intended to be a direct interpretation of the dialogue, but instead is just more comedic writing.  I found it very hard not to screenshot every piece of original and translated dialogue because of how hilarious a lot of the translations ended up being.  There were even a few instances where there were no interactions between characters happening, usually while traveling through worlds between monster encounters, that I wished there was another chance to use the translator.

While This Way Madness Lies is heavily based of JRPGs of the SNES era, there are several liberties Zeboyd Games takes which essentially makes this game somewhat of a JRPG-lite.  First off, you are able to select the overall difficulty of the game upfront, from Easy ("Easy Enemies, For those who love story") up to Hard ("Hardest Enemies, For those who love mastery") and within that difficulty setting in-game, all of the enemies are visible on-screen and some battles are avoidable.  Some of these enemies require the player to time their sprints between enemies like they were Simon Belmont in Dracula's castle, or you can just run into the enemies and engage in battle.  Even outside of battle in the menu screen, you can instigate a battle against enemies found in the level to grind more than would otherwise be necessary to get through the stage.  

Unlike traditional JRPGs, there is no equipping weapons and armor here, instead you equip traits that augment each character's stats, their abilities and consumable items to use during combat.  So while there might some poo-pooing about not being abe to find and equip better gear, determining which abilities each character will have during combat and which traits might better suit the character based on who is in the party has its own levels of complexity beyond picking the most recently earned skill.  And for me, even after 12 hours and fighting every monster I came across, as well as a few self-instigated battles, there were still about 10 or so abilities that I never unlocked per character.

Because this is a Zeboyd game, items respawn after each battle to be used indefinitely, and most abilities during combat are single-use until the character defends and then their used abilities recharge/combe back.  Although when you start the game you can only equip three items, you can find backpack upgrades in treasure chests throughout the levels; some chests are semi-hidden while most are visible but take some treking and minor-maze solving to find out how to get to them.  I usually found that I would have a healing potion, a potion to cure status ailments (although I never really seemed to bother with trying to cure ailments like poison as they never had very noticeable effects, or I just was not paying as much attention as I should have been).  There were also items that could cause damage to one or groups of enemies and I found that I liked having these as options for when I did not want to use up a characters abilities or if they did not have any attacks left (only having buff or ailment causing abilities left).

Unlike a lot of previous Zeboyd games however, the enemies do not get stronger as the battle progresses, which I was happy to see not happen.  But as with earlier games, the characters fully heal and revive if they are killed at the end of each battle, which makes the fact that enemies are sometimes more difficult than your average random monster battle in a JRPG (Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest) a little bit more foregiveable.  It is also nice that leveling up happens to the entire troupe, not just who is currently with you in your party and wether or not everyone survived.  It is just nice consideration to take the player's time into account and not have to worry about all of the characters leveling unequally to the point that one character is level 45 and another character is level 37 while the game levels the monsters towards the highest or lowest level character.

While the game has six primary characters (or does it have more!?), Imogen does fill the roll as the primary main character as she is playable for the entire game while the rest of the characters will swap in and out, sometimes in story-based ways and others in contextual circumstances.  Not having full control over who is in your party is part of the reason why leveling in the game happens the way it does, as you otherwise, again, might have severely under or overpowered characters.  Although by the end of the game, I did have my favorite tactics for going into battle which lead me to having certain favorite characters.  Beatrice for instance has the Toxic Cloud ability that poisoned all of the enemies who would take poison damage on their turns although the enemies would never die from poison, instead taking them down to 1 HP.  She also had the Doom ability which caused 150% dark damage to an enemy that was already poisoned.  I personally found the poisoning ability invaluable especially once enemies got into the 3000+ HP realm as they would take 200-350 damage along with whatever damage my characters did with their own attacks.  Although for whatever reason, possibly a combination of the traits I had equipped to Beatrice (and possibly because I also had the "Unique" trait equipped to Rosalind which made her "Less likely to be targeted by enemies"), but I found that while most characters died infrequently during battle, Beatrice ended up being "killed" 10+ times in the second half of the game.

Let us talk about the music for a bit.  Joshua Queen returns to score the music, who was the composer to Zeboyd's previous game, Cthulhu Saves Christmas.  The music is great and what I would expect from Joshua Queen (I talk as if I know the guy).  There is really only one exception and that is in the first dungeon/area.  The track, "Every Rose" itself is a good song and I have nothing against the song, but just over two and a half minutes into the song, the singing starts.  Granted the track starts back over from the beginning after each battle, but if you backtrack (like I tend to do) looking for every treasure chest and possible hidden locations, you are likely to spend more than two and-a-half minutes without getting into a fight.  Having this particular song as background music felt strange, mainly because I do not remember ever playing a JRPG where there was a song with lyrics playing in a dungeon map.  I could see it being used as the music in the final dungeon battling your way to the final boss, but having it in the first dungeon area felt strange in a way that I can really only explain as off-putting.  Again, the song itself I enjoy, but I question the choice of it being used this early in the game, and there being actual singing.  Maybe I am an old curmudgeon and like my JRPG dungeon music to be instrumental, but I feel like this song could have been looped before the singing started.  But do not be surprised if in the next week or two we end up featuring a song from this soundtrack on MIDI Week Singles.

Something that I wish that was implemented in the game was a skip option whenever the characters transform from their normal going-to-school outfits into their magical-girl outfits.  Each time they transform, the game enters a cutscene that shows each girl with close-up shots as their outfits change, although there is nothing gratuitous and the animations are all very tasteful.  They just take a while as they show each of the four characters, although sometimes due to in-game circumstances there might be fewer.  But the transformation scene does take a while from beginning to end, and I do not know if this was a criticism of the Sailor Moon series or other anime where characters transform, if that was what was supposed to be referenced.  Either way, I wish that there was the option to skip this sequence after the first time through; and keep the length of the last transformation scene for impact.

One last thing that I questioned is only a little bit of a spoiler.  About halfway through the game, the main character Imogen finds herself in a petshop and you are given the choice of one of four pets to choose.  I decided to go with the goldfish mainly because of how different it was from the other fantastical options such as Neko Dragon and Unicorn.  I think I liked the idea of the goldfish maybe actually turning out to be super intelligent, but instead it seemed to be a mundane goldfish.  I cannot comment on how the story progresses for the other pets, but maybe the goldfish is just a goldfish and I should have chosen a different pet if I wanted the pet storyline to abe interesting.  To me, this storyline (for which there is an achievement) did not go anywhere, and while I do like the idea of not everything in a story having a fulfilling storyarch, I was a little disappointed that this in fact did not go anywhere.  Maybe on a future playthrough I will choose the Neko Dragon.

The Steam page for This Way Madness Lies suggests that the game is playable in between 5-10 hours and if you look up at the top, you will see that it took me almost 12 and-a-half hours.  Although I tend to take longer just because of the way I play apparently, reading all of the dialogue, fighting all of the monsters and instigating a couple of fights on my own.  Plus I tended to go into the menu to look over the Items, Abilities, and Traits any time I gained new ones.  Additionally, entering new areas and fighting new monsters with differing weaknesses might require me to go in and more things around to make the characters in my party more efficient.  But even playing at two hours longer than what Zeboyds sees as a full playthrough, I loved that the game is as long (or as short) as it is, and something that I love about Zeboyd games in general.  You get a similar experience to playing a 50+ SNES era JRPG in a quarter of the time and I do not feel like I missed out on anything based on the story that was being told here.  Sure there were references to past events and hints at what could be a sequel (crossing fingers for that and a prequel), but that just helps to make the world feel already lived in and established.

I believe that This Way Madness Lies accomplished what it set out to do, to deliver a short and sweet JRPG, this one of the magical-girl type set in a Shakespearean universe with the obligatory Cthulhu mythos and SNES-era references in the storytelling, monster design, and overall amazing sense of humor.  The writing is again top notch and what you would come to expect from Zeboyd and I am eagerly awaiting either another game in the same universe or their next original game.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental

#IndieSelect: Gateways (PC)

I received a copy of Gateways on Steam from Indie Gamer Chick to be played for #IndieSelect.  The game was given and received without expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and the experience be shared on social media to help spread the word about indie games.  All pictures and words unless otherwise noted are my own from my own playthough.

Gateways

Systems: XBLIG, Windows

Release Date: September 13, 2012

Publisher: Smudged Cat Games Ltd.

Developer: Smudged Cat Games Ltd.
Time Spent: 8 Hours 36 Minutes

If I wanted to quickly and inaccurately describe Gateways, it would be to say that it is essentially a 2D Portal.  And while not entirely inaccurate, Gateways offers a lot more complex and mind-bending puzzles than what would be possible in Portal.  Yes, there is a gun that creates portals for you to enter and exit while solving puzzles, but there is also a Resizing gun, a Rotation gun, a Time Travel gun, and a Multi-Gun that lets you combine elements from all four guns albeit with some caveats.  Gateways is a wonderfully thought-out game with puzzles that both stumped and impressed me in their complexity, as well as infuriated me at my lack of being able to think my way into finding a solution without assistance.

Gateways was released by Smudged Cat Games back in 2012 as part of Xbox's Live Indie Games lineup.  You play as the scientist Ed who finds himself in his laboratory unsure as to what just happened to him, who broke into his lab, and why his Gateway Gun has gone missing.  The first 20% of the game does in fact play very similar to a 2D platforming Portal in that you are introduced to the world, there is jumping on platforms and around enemies to solve puzzles until you find the gateway gun.  Like Portal, the Gateway Gun allows you to create portals on specific walls to access areas that you cannot walk or jump to.  Passing through one portal leads you to the other portal, and vice-versa.  There are a handful of puzzles to solve as each puzzle gives you greater access to the map, opening up new puzzles to solve while avoiding enemies and environmental hazards.

Before we go into a further in-depth description and analysis of all of the other types of guns you find in Gateways, because there are more, we need to do a little bit of housekeeping.  Along with different types of guns, you can also find additional Health (allowing you to take an extra hit), an extension on the amount of time you have with the Time Travel Gateway Gun (more on that later), and the number of echoes you can have running around when you go back in time (more-more on that later).  Scattered throughout the areas of the map are 500 glowing blue orbs that can be used to purchase solutions to puzzles.  Each puzzle is a specific location and the way that the game implements this help/hint system is pretty ingenious.  

Any time there is a puzzle to solve in the game to grant you deeper access to the level, there is a Help Kiosk that gives you the choice to purchase the option to see if this particular puzzle is currently solvable and if you then want to purchase the solution to this puzzle.  Because there are several guns that have different functions throughout the game, some puzzles require you to backtrack to solve more complicated puzzles, and because this is the type of game that often requires the player to attempt a puzzle multiple times, trying different angles and different types of guns, it may not be obvious at first if you can solve a particular puzzle if you do not have both high-jump upgrades or if you do not have enough echos.  In the late game, as I was going back to solve previously unsolved puzzles, on at least two occasions, I found out that even with nearly all of the guns and a bunch of upgrades, I still could not solve the puzzle, so rather than wasting any more of my time, I left and had a nice red mark on my map so I knew where to go back to when it automatically turned green when it became solvable.  If the puzzle is solvable and you are still having trouble (no shame, as I used this feature quite a few times in the late game), you can buy the solution, at which point the game asks if you want it to take over, and you watch as the puzzle is solved for you in real-time, and once you clear the puzzle, the game relinquishes control.  What is doubly great about this mechanic, is that if part of the puzzle is about getting through a difficult area, you can simply activate the Help Kiosk again (without having to pay any more Orbs) and the game will again take over control until it reaches the end of that puzzle.

The next gun gives you access to the Resizing Gateway Gun which allows you to either shrink down to (roughly) half your height, or nearly triple your size if you pass through the larger of the two portals; the Resizing Gun creates a large portal and a smaller portal, and the size you end up as depends on which portal you exit out of, but you cannot get infinitely small or infinitely large.  Looking back, I can only think of one or two puzzles that required you to be larger than your default size, as the Resizing gun was primarily used to shrink you down to force you into small tunnels/hallways.  It really felt like a portable version of Wayne Szalinski's Shrinking Machine and I would not be upset about an entire game that gave you greater freedom to manipulate your height in either direction.  I just wanted more instances to use this gun to be bigger, but that is acknowledgedly more difficult to do in a map designed around platforming, spiked floors, and patrolling enemies.

The most confusing gun in the game and how best to implement it was the Time Travel Gateway Gun.  I seem to recall that the game did a decent job of explaining the basic mechanics of the gun, in that you needed to use the time-shifting function to exit the room you had just entered, but the developing complexity of how best to use the gun, the game did not prepare me for.  Let me see if I can explain how the Time Travel gun worked because again, it is still somewhat confusing.  When you first use the gun to place a portal on the wall (we'll call Portal A), it activates an on-screen timer, showing you how long you have until Portal A closes on its own.  Once you place the second portal (Portal B), Portal A closes and you have set the length of your time loop (that might be a bad way of describing it) if you do not enter Portal A before the timer for Portal B reaches the end, then it will close.  When you enter Portal B, you exit through Portal A at the time that you set Portal A, and you now see your past self (echos) doing whatever it was you were doing before you set Portal B and went through it.  If you happen to touch your echo in any way, both portals disappear along with your echoes and you continue where the collision occurred and have to reset your portals.  These potential collisions can get very tricky later in the game when you often have to have multiple echoes activating and standing on pressure-sensitive buttons to open doors.  This gets even trickier in the late game where the amount of space you can place portals is limited so the area around your entrance/exit becomes very hazardous.

The last type of gun you find is the Rotation Gateway Gun, which after playing the game for just over eight hours I find a little hard to explain without a visual diagram.  Unlike the primary Gateway Gun, which reorients you upon exiting the exit portal regardless if it is on the wall, floor, or ceiling, the Rotation gun can rotate the world based on where the entrance and exit portals are placed.  This is when the difficulty in the puzzles really ramped up.  Knowing where to place your two portals to get the desired effect was oftentimes confusing for me, and only once after watching the game solve a puzzle for me did I figure out that the easiest way to flip the map 180 degrees was to place both portals on the same surface (in this case being the floor).  There was one puzzle that required you to enter the same set of directional portals multiple times to solve the puzzle, something that had not happened before and I was not mentally prepared for that kind of solution.

The final gun you find is the Multi Gateway Gun, which combines all of the previous guns so that you can use more than one type of gateway at a time.  Previously, you could only have one type of gateway activated at a time, so if you want to activate the Rotation Gateway, you have to close the Resizing Gateways you have open and when you close whichever gateways you have open, you revert to normal (your size goes back to your default size, and any rotation from the Rotation gun reverts to normal gravity).  Before the multi Gateway Gun, solving puzzles was a little more straightforward in that once you figured out which gun you needed, then it was a lot of trial and error to solve the puzzle.  With the Multi gun, I was a little afraid that knowing which combination of guns was going to be confusing, and the mechanics around the Time Travel gun only compounded that fear.  Because when using the Time Travel function in tandem with the other functions, those functions have to be used first before using Time Travel, because once you place a Time Travel gateway, you cannot place any other gateways.  This is definitely one of those times when learning all of this was a lot easier by doing rather than trying to figure out what I am talking about by reading.

The rest of the primary puzzles that lead you to the end of the game required you to use multiple gateways to find the solution and this was when I used up the majority of my orbs to have the game solve the puzzles for me.  I fully admit that I used 415 orbs through some combination of determining if puzzles were solvable and having the puzzles solved for me.  No shame, because the mechanic was there in the game to be used if need be, and for a handful of puzzles, I really needed help.  Another thing I liked about having paid for puzzles to be solved, aside from the frustration of trying to figure out what to do after spending at least 10 minutes banging my head against the wall, was that there were a few puzzles that required solving just to move to the next room.  So when you went to the Help kiosk, you could activate the kiosk again (without paying again) and the game would take over control and solve the puzzle for you again.  Again, no shame in this, because that is what the orbs were for and an optional accessibility feature is a welcome feature.

An optional equipment pickup that I only found because I was doing some exploring after getting stuck on a puzzle, was the Time Suit.  The Time Suit allows you to be in the same space as one of your echos so you do not run the risk of resetting time by accidentally running into your echo.  Thinking about the final puzzle in the game, I do not know how more difficult that would make the puzzle, but I know that not having to think about that was a huge relief.  The other Time Travel Gateway Gun-related items you pick up in certain rooms upon solving puzzles, the extra echos and extra time were also welcome finds when I felt I could not solve puzzles.  I believe you need at least four echos out of the possible eight that you find, but that is only on the normal difficulty.

Yes, there are apparently two difficulties and I only realized that while trying to figure out the final puzzle in the game.  The thing with this last puzzle, is that there is no Help kiosk to solve the puzzle for you, which was a little worrisome, but I was able to solve the pentultimate puzzle so I thought that this last one was not going to be as troublesome as say, "Dancing on the Ceiling" or "Splitting the Laser."  After figuring out the different parts to the puzzle, where I thought I needed to have the Resizing gateway, the standard gateway, the Rotational gateway, and the Time Travel gateway, I realized that I was still not any close to figuring out the solution after 20 minutes of trial and mostly error.  I ended up browsing the Discussions section in Steam and managed to find a walkthrough.  The only problem was that this final room had two lasers that I had to redirect whereas the room I was looking at only had the one.  This was getting out of hand.  

I did watch Smudge Cat's walkthrough on the final puzzle and marveled at what they expected the player to have grasped by the end of the game, because I can tell you that I never would have been able to solve this puzzle on hard.  In fact, I was not even able to solve the puzzle on normal difficulty, even with all of the Time Travel power-ups (that extend the amount of time you can spend in the time loop, and the number of echoes you can have running around), trying to figure out where to place the Rotation gateway and how to wrap my brain around all of the hopping between Time Travel gateways was crazy.  Major kudos to Pup and their walkthrough of the final puzzle on normal difficulty because I would not have been able to beat the game had I not watched, rewatched, rewatched, paused, rewound, rewatched, and paused multiple times just to figure out what I was expected to do to solve this beast.  I easily attempted the final puzzle on normal no fewer than five times, with mistiming jumps, or not getting the Time Travel gateway in the right spot while trying to line it up with where I would eventually need it five steps from when I placed it.  And had I not had the walkthrough, I can nearly promise you that even if I had the gateways in the same correct place, I would have thought that I had them in the wrong place after failing on my fourth or fifth attempt.

Despite my frustration on the final puzzle, Gateways was a really fun game, that at times made me feel like a genius capable of understanding quantum entanglement, and other times incapable of describing which way is up.  Had I not been able to find a walkthrough on the final puzzle because the developers decided to purposefully not offer an in-game solution, I know that I would have a significantly less favorable view of the game overall.  I am impressed with people who have been able to solve the final puzzle without any kind of assistance and acknowledge that my brain had a hard time with both the Rotation Gateway Gun and the Time Travel Gateway Gun, especially in tadem with the Multi Gateway Gun.  I am even more impressed with Smudge Cat for thinking of a puzzle this complicated and at the same time hate them for it.  This is not necessarily a great way to finish your game and it definitely felt like whatever playtesters Smudge Cat used were also the same people who developed the game.  So thanks again to Pup for really redeeming the game for me in the end.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Out Of My Brain, On The Train

#IndieSelect: Valentina (NS)

Disclaimer:  I received a free copy of Valentina from publisher QUByte Interactive through #IndieSelect.  The game was given and received without expectation or promise of a positive review, only that the game be played and that experience be shared through social media channels.  All words and screenshots of the gameplay unless otherwise noted are my own from my own experience.

Valentina is a pixel art-style platformer from indie game developer Luamar Games and published on the Nintendo Switch by QUByte Interactive.  The game was originally developed as a mobile game (Valentina: The Princess Archer) and was released on the Google Play store earlier in the year.  Had I known this before I started playing, I might have gone in with a little more of a forgiving mind and lessened my expectations, and while I seemed to find something that bothered me about the game in terms of game mechanics, behind-the-scene mechanics, translation and localization, and a whole host of other issues, I did finish the game.  Kind of, but I will get to that at the end as I do not want to spoil anything, just yet anyway.

I mean, you can understand what is going on, but there are
just a number of grammatical errors.

Let us start with the translation, presumably from the developer's native Portuguese (from Brazil), not to say that nothing could be understood as I was able to follow along quite well, but it does not look like the dialogue script was run by anyone who reads/writes English.  What it looks like is someone took the original Portuguese script and put it through Google Translate then used that translation.  Sometimes.  I noticed that on some occasions, there was still an "e" in place for an "and" or that the Portuguese had not been translated at all.  This is not to harp on the developer that everything should be in English because 'MURICA!, only that in a game with as much dialogue as this one has, being able to convey the story and the purpose of the character and their motivations is very important.  I did reach out to QUByte Interactive to try to put me in contact with Luamar Games to rewrite the English translation (not that I speak Portuguese, but it was to take the existing English translation and revamp it), but I did not hear back as of this publishing.

The story in the game is more-or-less fine, nothing inspiring.  Like a lot of JRPGs, Valentina is hiding out in a village to keep her royal heritage a secret, and the kingdom is taken over and her parents imprisoned by the Empire of Darkness.  She goes on a quest to rescue her brother João who has attempted to reclaim the throne and save them all by fighting against four generals in four themed worlds.  Each world is made up of about 10 individual areas, which at first sounds exciting, but in reality is about 7 areas per world too many as the platforming becomes very repetitive, especially by the fourth world: jump across floating platforms that sink into water, jump up platforms in a stair-like manner, make blind jumps down into a short S-shaped cave then ride a platform back out to the open-air then, maybe, repeat.  And by that point in the game, I had stopped carrying about enemies and was literally running through them with reckless abandon.  There are towns at the beginning of each new area, and sometimes interspersed in the middle, but there is nothing to do in the towns aside from receiving exposition and not being populated with enemies.  Which brings me to my next criticism.

80 Gold Worth of Potions!

When you kill enemies, they will either drop money (gold=1 and green=5 coins), arrows, or potions.  The game never explains what it is that these loot dropz do, but it might be safe to make assumptions.  You shoot arrows that deplete via a counter, and picking up arrows replenishes that counter.  When you pick up gold, your gold counter goes up, but it was not until I saw a Tweet from Monokuma_V3 that I found out that collecting 100 gold gives you five potions up to a maximum of 25.  Potions will refill your life bar by 1.5 bars out of 5.  For the entire game, unless I missed a well-hidden power-up somewhere, potions will always heal you for 1.5.  Initially this 100 gold to 5 potions sounds like a pretty decent trade-off until I tell you that by halfway through the game, I had over 800 gold, meaning that my potions were maxed out at 25 so frequently, that I just kept on collecting that sweet sweet gold.  And there was no exchange in that if I used a series of potions to prevent dying, gold would not be taken out (of my pouch?) to buy more potions, it just stayed there.  Forever?  The entire game I was hoping that you would come across a merchant who you could buy permanent upgrades from, but this again never happened.

The next thing that bothered me was the animations used for Valentina and a lot of the monsters.  For Valentina, her running animation was more-or-less fine, but her jumping looked as if her back foot lifted off the ground a few pixels, and her ponytails lifted up while her arms stick out.  I guess I'm just focusing on the lack of leg movement.  But speaking of her jumping, the actual mechanics of Valentina jumping bothered me too as it just felt too floaty, as in the character would move just a little bit forward even after you stopped moving and the same happned when you were jumping.  This bad control design made jumping onto moving platforms, especially ones that had short routes, very difficult to judge where you were going to land.  Maybe this was an issue that did not exist in the original mobile game, but for me, it made playing some areas agonizing dying time and time again to what should have been simple jumps.

Speaking of bad mechanics and design, let me take a minute to talk about whatever coding was used for the bosses.  First off, the design of the bosses was great, and if they had functioned normally, they could have been terrifying.  Instead, boss battles consisted of staying still for the majority of the battle while you unloaded arrows into broken pixely meat sponges.  Or a stone sponge in the case of the second boss who would crumble in a death-type-animation, thereby essentially stunning it, giving you another opportunity to attack, causing it damage, thereby stunning it again, and so on and so forth.  There also seemed to be a problem with either the hit detection from the bosses or maybe even Valentina's hitboxes.  In the aforementioned battle (against General #2), I stood my ground while the sprites of the boss went through the player and did not take any damage.  Most of the time I did not take damage although I was hit on a few occasions.  This happened multiple times and with every boss.

And then there was the final boss battle.  You see this boss in the trailer too so I was looking forward to this battle, although not as much as I was before I experienced how the bosses were programmed.  In this battle, you approach the area where you fight the Minotaur and have to jump up onto a ledge to be on the same level.  Except I stayed on the lower embankment.  I jumped, fired an arrow, and hit the boss.  Then I did it again, and again.  The Minotaur could not engage with me because I was on a different plane.  So rather spend the next five minutes sponging arrows, I jumped onto the same level, and that is when it charged me and started swinging its massive tree-sized axe.  And I did not take damage.  So I stood there firing arrow after arrow into the thing.  Then I got bored and moved further to the right and found yet another spot on a different level than the Minotaur so I jumped up there and proceeded to take it down to about 2%-ish health.  I jumped down to be on the same playable area just so that it did not die off screen.

Something else I wanted to touch on was how there were a lot of environmental "gotcha" moments in the game, and by that I mean that you were forced to blindly jump down to an area you could not see.  The second world was particularly bad because it at first taught you that spike pits were a certain distance away from the edge of cliffs/platforms, then have the pit extend further out on a jump you could not see.  What made these hidden hazards so much worse was that the spikes were Mega Man levels of dangerous in that one hit and you are dead, which then takes you back to the beginning of the area (thankfully not the world otherwise I would have never finished) with all of the arrows and potions you had when you started that area.  Add on top of that how I previously said that some of the areas start to feel repetitive, trying to remember where the pit you died and need to jump a little bit further can be difficult to recall.

The last negative thing I wanted to bring up, which is a semi spoiler, is that apparently Valentina is a series?  I think?  Maybe?  Because nowhere in the game description, either on the Google Play Store or Nintendo's eShop make mention of this.  Even events in the game do not hint that there is anything more to your quest than what you are already doing.  You defeat the four generals of the Empire of Darkness, then maybe fight the main boss, then rescue your parents.  But nope, that is not what happens.  After you defeat General number four (the Minotaur), you return to one of the villages where you talk with your brother and friends you have met along the way, which is no different than any other in-between stage.  Then you go to the arrow signpost as you have done a great many times before to head out on your final adventure.

What the Deuce!?

Yup.  You get a "To Be Continued" screen, fade to black, and back to the main menu.  This was a huge letdown to a game I had wanted to like and even though the last level felt like a trudge (as I just stopped caring and found that I could just run through enemies without taking damage, but only if I did not stop in their same space) and I just wanted to see the end.  Now, if there ever is a sequel, I do not know if I will feel compelled to play.  Probably not, but I do not want to rule out that possibility entirely.  Maybe the developer has learned from some / a lot of the rough edges here. 

But not everything about Valentina is bad.  The pixel art for the worlds, the landscapes, the characters, some of the monsters, and especially the bosses are spot on.  They often look just detailed enough to not feel out of place with the rest of the game (think the mobile re-ports of Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy VI).  The art is appropriately pixely, blocky where it needs to be, and never looking too crisp for its own good.  The numbers that appear on-screen when you do damage are smooth compared to the rest of the world, but that ended up being something that I did notice, but never bothered me.  The only negative thing I have to say regarding the graphics is that Valentina's bowstring, is just a single line that does not fit in with the rest of the pixel sizes, and considering that firing arrows are her only way to attack, I did notice this anachronism quite often, but that could also just me being picky.

Another thing that I did actually enjoy about Valentina was the music, which I sadly cannot showcase because I could not find any information on the composer, which makes me think that it might have been music that was pre-written and purchased for use in the game.  Since there are no credits to the game, there was no way I could find out (aside from reaching out to the developer and finding them for that matter) if the music was written specifically for the game, or if a music pack was purchased and plugged into the game, and no shame if this was the route because I found the music very suiting for when it was used.

Looking at the reviews that Valentina: The Princess Archer received on the Google Play Store, really makes me wonder who is playing the game, and if the game just works better as a mobile game.  Maybe the bosses are not as wonky in their animations and maybe there is a real challenge.  Maybe that is not the point though.  I feel like there is some potential here, that Valentina on the Switch almost feels like a rough draft after figuring out the outline, but it needs a fair amount of work.

~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian

A Maelstrom of Silvery Light

First Impressions: The Way Remasterd (NS)

The Way Remastered is an interesting game.

It is also a beautifully pixely game.

It also has me completely stumped, on one particular puzzle.

The Way Remastered is a retro-esque pixel puzzle based platformer that takes place in the future where humans have explored alien worlds and interplanetary travel seems to be relegated to either governments, or wealthy companies.  So probably not unlike the Alien and Blade Runner universe.  But The Way Remastered does not feel like it is trying to hang itself on nostalgia or require the player to be familiar with either of the aforementioned franchises, or any other franchises that come to mind.

I really want to talk about the opening scene, because it happens in the opening scene it is not so much a spoiler as if I told you who the Prince was, but it caught me so off guard that I was immediately taken with the game and I would rather not spoil that for anyone else coming blind into the game.  So, let me just say that it was a very subdued and effective introduction to the world and main character.

The rumble of the doors opening is oddly satisfying.

Playing TWR on the Switch was one of two catalysts for buying the game with the fact that it was 75% off being the second reason for picking it up.  I had read that the game made excellent use of the HD Rumble feature in the Switch Joy-Cons and I thought that having a sensitive rumble feature utilized in a puzzle game would be a lot of fun; similar to how Bethesda integrated the HD Rumble in the lock picking mechanism in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and now I can pick master locks early in the game if I am careful enough and listen for the telltale "clack."  So far however, the HD Rumble is more of an icing-on-the-cake feature than one that is utilized to solve puzzles.  When automatic doors slide open there is a cascading vibration that goes up the Joy-Con, or landing jumps there is a weightier buzz towards the bottom of the controller.  Playing in handheld mode definitely mixes the HD Rumble feature, but playing in docked mode with the Joy-Cons in separate hands down at my side is probably my preferable way to play.

Ugh!  What does it all mean!?

And as for the puzzle that has stopped my playing dead in its tracks is a bit of a doozy.  The problem seems more of a communication issue with the developers trying to get across what they want the player to do in a way that the way to solve the puzzle is part of the background.  I think.  After numerous attempts lasting 15+ minutes each time, I decided that I would break and look up the solution to the puzzle online.  Unfortunately, this particular puzzle, titled "The Abyss" has stumped nearly every person who has publicly talked about it.  It involves hitting mirrors with a beam of light in order to make a pattern that is not entirely clear.  And to be fair, the game does try to give you clues like when the character says out loud, "Mirror, mirror on the wall?" to get you to utilized the silver slice of mirror that will also reflect light to hit the panels that angle the red beams one of two ways.

So presently, I am in a bit of a pickle when it comes to recommending this game.  Everything up until this doozey of a puzzle has me definitely recommending it to everyone who has a system that it will play on, which looks to be PC and Switch.  But, I am sure there are people smarter than I who have gotten through the puzzle on the Switch, so I may just have to occasionally return to this alien planet to see if my brain is working in a way that helps me to solve this little humdinger.  So yeah, I guess I would still recommend The Way Remastered.  Here is to hoping.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Instrumental

Pak Watch - more pixely art indie game goodness

Takume, the dreaming daughter
talecrafter
PC
Takume is a very short (around 5 min.) and linear atmospheric and dramatic adventure game. A mystic story about identity, dreaming and dealing with past events. I like the art. Free to download and play.

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Rain World
Adult Swim Games
PS4
Rain World. Looks sweet. really like the rusty pixel art graphics. You control a white, weasel-like creature called a 'slug cat.' Looks like instense, atmospheric platforming. When the rain falls, it falls hard, shakes the ground, and will kill you. I don't own a PS4, but if I did, I'd be interested.

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Totem Teller
Grinning Pickle
PC/Multiplatform
The graphics in this game are totally nuts! I love how it's glitchy and grainy, but also looks polygonal? Colorful. Some kind of storytelling theme. Not a lot of detail. Press kit says "Explore a world without prompts, golden paths or other hand holding." Intruiging.


-D