IMHO: Deadly Days

It's In My Humble Opinion™ time once again, and that mean that it's time for my old nemesis, the zombie apocalypse survival game. They just never seem to die, and I am condemned to keep playing them and to keep finding them ultimately unsatisfying. Yes, today I played my next game from the July Humble Bundle, Deadly Days.

Deadly Days is a zombie apocalypse survival game in which you try (and in my short experience, generally fail) to guide the pixelated remnants of humanity through a series of procedurally generated suburbs that are swamped with a never-ending tide of similarly pixelated zombies. Each day you pick a trip based on your little settlement's needs from a small number of options, drive your converted bus to the site, and then try to scrounge up enough food, tools, scrap metal and weaponry to get you through the next day before escaping again on the bus before you're overwhelmed by an ever-increasing tide of the undead.

Now I'm not really into this genre, to put it mildly, but I have to say that this is a pretty decent hookline, colour me slightly intrigued. Unfortunately, while the concept might be a winner, the execution leaves me more than a little cold, and after six run-throughs, some of them depressingly short and all of them well short of seeing the endgame, I'm done. Before this blog series completely dissolves into a sea of negativity, it's worth mentioning that there are some things that I don't hate about this title.

1) It's only a couple of hundred megabytes, and in an age where every game seems to come with a mandatory download time measured in the hours, that's quite refreshing, especially to this guy on an inconsistent wifi connection. I'd be very disappointed if this little game with little art was any bigger than that, but I'm often a little surprised by how big some of these titles are.

2) Deadly Days knows that zombies are silly and isn't afraid not to take itself too seriously. The populace was infected by dodgy burgers and the survivors include an animated skeleton, an astronaut and a guy in a banana suit. This would have been no fun at all if they had tried to go the gritty horror route.

3) Especially once you get some slightly more powerful weaponry, the ability to carve your way through the dead is extremely satisfying, the weapons used and the special abilities gel well for this, and if I were an eight-year-old boy, I would think that was incredibly badass, in the same way that I enjoyed a game like Cannon Fodder when I was that age.

Unfortunately, I think that that's all the things that I liked, and I'm afraid it's Debbie Downer time from here on in. Here's some things I didn't like so much:

1) The game revolves around three currencies. Tools, which can be used to improve your base and weaponry. Food, which is used to heal your dudes and level them up, and is consumed each day. And Scrap, which is used to improve your base and weaponry. Yes, you need both tools and scrap to improve your kit, and getting them on any particular mission seems to be more or less random (with a few exceptions, like the hardware stores missions, where you're likely to encounter tools). Given that you need some serious upgrades seriously quickly to stop your little band being badly overrrun, being starved for one or the other of them is a one-way ticket to zombietown. As is being starved of food, which just might not appear on any given map, or be hidden somewhere inaccessible to you if the procedurally generated town hasn't given you a good path back to the bus. Bad luck, start again, I guess.

2) Each level sees you running around a map, popping zombies and collecting goodies by sending one survivor to loot a car, house or shop while the others continue to fight against the waves of the undead. The looter can't be attacked by the zombies, but they're going to be overwhelmed when they finish their looting if the rest of the gang leaves them behind. This means that you're more or less tied down to the speed of your looting, and when your other guys are just standing around instead of actively exploring, the game doesn't have enough going on to make that interesting. Given that the looting of the bigger targets can take half of your allocated time on any given level, this mechanic makes the game feel slow and frustrating in a way that might work well thematically but is just terrible as a gameplay element. It feels like some kind of rhythm like this might allow for interesting choices if you could split up and individually control your party, but you can't (you can only direct them like one big brainless horde) and so it fell very flat for me as a result.

3) I want the pressure to slowly build to breaking point to get the sense of impending doom in my zombie media, but the difficulty in Deadly Days ramps up in strange and unpredictable ways that feels like a roll of a dice rather than a ratchet of tension. Buying good items (you know, the ones that might mix the game up and make it interesting) will dramatically pump the difficulty, such that it seems like it's better to poorly equip your guys to stay weak for as long as you can to avoid facing powerful enemies, but some days it just seems to drastically increase overnight for no obvious reason, and if you've been avoiding those over-powered pick-ups, well, I'm sorry to tell you pardner but you are a dead man walking.

So, this was frustrating, and not in a nice "oh if I just do it like that I might last longer" kind of way. At least only playing this one for a little while meant that I was relatively quick to get out the blog post, I suppose.

Some quick numbers

• Time played: 103 minutes
• "Survivors": 16
• Zombies "killed": I didn't count, but probably thousands.
• Rocket Launchers recovered: 1, but it felt good.
• Rating: 3 deficits of brains out of 10

The rankings so far

It's frustrating to say it, but despite the lower ranking and this being just generally a less-polished product than Yakuza 3, I think I enjoyed Deadly Days more. Still not enough that I would recommend anyone play it, though.

1. Hammerting
2. Deadly Days
3. Yakuza 3

I'm worried that my rankings so far have been harsh, but they do reflect why this was a month that didn't exactly fill me with excitement when I saw the titles. Let's hope that we'll be more inspired by the headliner for the bundle...Dirt 5.

IMHO: Hammerting

Back in March, when I was last a little active on this perpetually fallow little blog, I got six posts into a twelve post series about my thoughts on the February Humble bundle. Though I played a couple more games in that bundle (and have one mostly-written post to join my extensive collection of drafts that will never see the light of day), rather than head back in time I thought I might give the concept another whirl with the most recent bundle instead. But here's a couple of problems that I foresee with this approach:

• Starting again means that I'm further from the finish line, which as a chronic project-starter seems like a pretty poor plan. But I always was a sucker for punishment, and besides, more games means more posts in a month where I'm trying to put out a lot of words, right? 
  
  
• Having not planned to do Blaugust before I got on my flight, I haven't had a chance to pre-download any of the games back when I had lightning fast British internet. Given the general slow speed and regular drop-outs of the internet connection here in quarantine, I don't have high hopes of being able to get my hands on all too many of the games over the next week or so. We'll see how we go on that front.
  
  
• I am just not particularly interested in this month's games. Back in February there were a couple of titles that I knew that I'd enjoy and a couple that I was at least intrigued about. A scan through this month's options doesn't exactly fill me with confidence on that front. This is not an unfamiliar story with the Humble Choice for me, which is a clear indication that I need to reduce my subscription.

However, there was one game on the list that had been sitting on my watchlist for a little while. Hammerting sees you manage a small colony of dwarves, exploring a procedurally generated mountain and generally trying to make your fortune. As someone who has tried and failed to get into Dwarf Fortress on multiple occasions, I'd been morbidly interested it this one as a potential way into a DF vibe without the learning curve of difficulty spikes that have made that game utterly incomprehensible to me. There's just something compelling about dwarves, I guess. Sadly, after playing it for almost 18 hours over the last couple of days (there's really nothing else to do but sleep or watch the Olympics, and don't worry, I've been doing plenty of both of those, too), I can confidently say that Hammerting might be lots of things, but it is definitely not anything like the mind-melter that I've found Dwarf Fortress.

The game was released in Steam Early Access back in October 2020, and here in early August 2021, while there's been eight substantial updates, it is still very, very clearly a game that is in early access. After what I very much hope is a placeholder tutorial of the "here is the menu button, press it to get the menu" variety that does very little to prepare you for what's coming, your three dwarves are sent into a mountain and you're left to your own devices (apart from little queue of quests that generate as you go to give you a few targets along the way) in a side-on view of a mostly dark mountain. This isn't completely a bad thing, the learning curve is gentle and the game is simple enough that you're not going to drown in mechanics before you work out what's going on out there, but it's not a good first impression.

Sadly, it turns out mostly what's going out there is a whole lot of empty space (although admittedly it's a very easy on the eyes variety of empty space), which you must explore in order to gain points that can be traded for improved technology. Some of that empty space has different colours, but though the default sized mountain is very large indeed, so far it seems like there's really only a couple of types of challenges that need to be dealt with: There are big holes, that you'll have to dig around, water, that doesn't seem to do anything to phase dwarves at all, and enemy camps, that can easily be blown up by attacking them. Do these obstacles get harder as you go down the mountain? Maybe a little, but not noticeably so. After digging for a couple of days, it's clear that there's more to discover down there, but also that it's probably not going to be meaningfully different to what's come before. Sure, I could keep digging, but there's been no real indication that there's anything in it for me, and it's certainly not going to be worth wrestling with a user interface and lack of control that is constantly frustrating. 

The other part of the game is trading the goodies that you've found or manufactured with other settlements accessed via the world map for money and for trading points, the other currency required to improve your tech. This section has apparently recently had a revamp, but like the delving, once you've gotten the hang of the basics, there doesn't seem to be anything interesting going on, and this bit doesn't have the possibility of building mighty empire-spanning railcart rollercoasters to redeem it. It feels like it's set up to have different nations battling each other, allowing you to influence the fight somehow, but after 18 hours in my game, this aspect seems completely absent, and even if it did affect you as a player, the overworld seems so divorced from the real world underground that it's hard to imagine how anything happening here it could make any substantial effect on your game.

If this were a regular game, it would immediately have been uninstalled and dragged into my 'Timewasters' Steam category, reserved for games that are a perfectly reasonable way to spend a few hours but that I have no particular need to experience again unless a peculiar itch overcomes me. Since it's in active development, I think it'll go off into the 'Rainy Day' category, to be revisited at some point in the future just to see if it's gotten any more interesting. As with the Wild Eight, another Early Access title we visited in this series last time, there's definite potential here, but the difference between what exists and what seems to be envisioned is a vast gulf that will probably never be bridged. It comes with a Team 17 logo, something I've associated with quality work in the past, so I hope I'm wrong, but if I am then it's certain that the finished product is a long way away.

And because I'm feeling a little pent up frustration, in no particular order, here's a list of things that bugged me that I hope they'll get around to fixing before they call the game complete. Some seem more easily fixable that others:

• There are different grades of materials that you can build the same equipment from. Using better materials increases the resale value, but doesn't seem to make any other substantive difference, and you also don't seem to have any control as to which quality materials different producers use. I don't know how many golden railway tracks I've made, wasting huge piles of coin and a limited resource for no additional benefit.
  
  
• There are skill trees but they don't make any sense at all. The high-level skills all require overlapping trees. It feels like this whole aspect needs to be ripped out and rebuilt from scratch
  
  
• There are neat little character models and character portraits that give each of your dwarves a distinct character, but they don't match each other. This hurts. General interaction with the character menus is a little haphazard and needs a bit of a revamp sometime, too.
  
  
  
  
  
• Some of the more complicated automation tasks like water pumping and drilling aren't very intuitive and desperately need a detailed tutorial or tooltip.
  
  
• You can control which dwarves do which roles, which works relatively well, although the interface is a little inconsistent. You can't stop any dwarves from fighting, though, which means that your entire colony grinds to a halt whenever any dwarf meets and enemies anywhere in the mountain. It would be nice to be able to set a maximum number of dwarves that will perform a certain task (like fighting or trading) at any given time, as well as just having toggles for each dwarf and some archetype templates.
  
  
• There's not really any danger out there, or any variety in that danger. Every nest of enemies can just be beaten up by clicking on it and waiting. If different enemies required different strategies (these ones need to be drowned, or set on fire, or kept under observation, or you need to use weapons with long reach, these ones can be farmed) and there were a greater range of defensive and military options (the only thing in this category at the moment are doors), that would make the game more tactically interesting.
  
  
• Dwarven priorities are a little strange. You can set certain building and construction tasks to high, medium or low priority, but you can't set the priority of digging, and even if a dwarf is set to only care about digging, sometimes tasks are just ignored for hours at a time, even if there doesn't seem to be any competing priorities. They also love jumping off places and getting themselves stuck in caverns or elevator shafts.
  
  
  
  
  
• The 'overland' trading game doesn't have very much variance at all. There are different types of settlements that provide different goods, but they they all buy more or less the same things, and there's no easy way to compare prices for saleable goods across the world or to set up automated trading. Different capitals all have the same special trading task, right from extremely early, which require you to sell them two resources, on which can't be produced until half-way down the tech tree and one that can only be found extremely rarely somewhere in the mountain. 
  
  
• Some of the other quests are really strange, too. One of them, acquired when you build you cookhouse, extremely early on, requires you to make crab soup. I'm yet to find crab meat, either in the mountain or for trade, so this task is just sitting there unfinished with the endgame goals.
  
  
• Final task is just insane. It requires you to collect 10,000 gold. I have maxed out my population and finished the tech tree and I have 3 gold, the most I've had in the whole game is 12, and tradingl which I've talked about above as an utterly uncompelling part of the game, is the only way to each money. I'm certain that I could give up on exploration and just pump out goods constantly for hundreds of hours in order to tick this off, but I'm equally sure that that wouldn't be remotely interesting for anyone involved.

Verdict? It's still Early Access, let's wait and see. I know I'm sounding a little down about the whole thing, but being able to sink this many hours into a game before I gave up in frustration is a promising start, as long as the team follows through.

Some quick numbers

• Time played: 17.8 hours
• Icy caverns explored: 3
• Rats butchered: Somewhere on the far side of 100
• Depths plumbed: Moderate
• Rating: 6 golden railway tracks out of 10

Next up... just as soon as it finishes downloading.. .and play it... and write about it to my satisfaction... Yakuza 3.

IMHO - Boomerang Fu

This is game number six of games that are part of the February 2021 Humble Choice bundle. The original depressingly naïve version of this opening paragraph crowed that I was on track to finish the February bundle before the March one is due to be released. That's no longer even close to being true, but lets see if we can't get that monkey off our back by finally sitting down and writing about Boomerang Fu.

Boomerang Fu is a cute little three-button party game from a first-time Australian studio in which pieces of food try to slice each other up for fun and profit, causing them to die in various amusing ways (the coffee mug smashes, the milk carton spills, the avacado stone pops out, etc.). As someone who grew up sitting patiently waiting for my turn to play pretty much anything, any game that allows for a bunch of players to jump on the couch and duke it out it okay with me. As far as I'm concerned, couch multiplayer is the peak video gaming experience, nothing quite gets near the emotional rollercoaster of the near misses, drama and wiping the smirk off the face of the guy that's killed you three times in a row. It's practically sports, except that I don't need to go lie down as soon as it's over.

It's just as well that I like couch multiplayer, though, as this little title doesn't have online multiplayer at all, which particularly for a game released in 2020 in the height of a pandemic seems like just a little bit of an oversight. There is also the slight problem that there's no chance in hell of convincing Mrs. Owl to play a game like this, so I guess at the moment the only person that I have to play this with are the bots, who are pretty stupid even on the highest difficulty level, even if they're dead shots with a boomerang. The more I think about it, though, the less this omission it feels like an oversight, because I think the developers could tell that Boomerang Fu just isn't the kind of game that people are going to play online.

Will this powerup be awesome, like telekinesis, or a liability that will cause me to blow myself up?

There are three modes, free-for-all, teams and golden boomerang, but they are all pretty much the same idea. The whole game is extremely simplistic, able to be picked up in a few moments. It's a perfect party game to have on in the corner, letting players jump in and out: each level has different obstacles to overcome and it cycles through levels fast enough that nothing gets boring, and it even has a nice little catch-up mechanic or two, giving trailing players an extra life. It's just not the sort of game that people are going to be raving about so much that they want to play it online with their mates. This game just isn't worth the hassle of jumping into the group chat and herding the cats in order to play it.

 There's also the small matter of the price: Boomerang Fu, a party game that feels like a souped-up early 00's flash game, retails for £11.93 in a world where the big games that everyone is playing right now are Valheim (£15.49) and Loop Hero (£12.49). Are all your friends really going to shell out for it? If I were a cynic I'd wonder if this game wasn't picked for the bundle just so that the Humble Choice could have a retail value of £201.38.

Extra points for including my personal killer feature, the .GIF capture button.

I'm also in two minds about the name. On one hand, the name instantly told me exactly what this game was going to be, a dumb fighting game with projectiles. On the other hand, it frustrates me a lot that the phrase Boomerang Fu doesn't...mean anything. Big opportunity missed to at least call this Boomerang Fu'd (because they're food, get it?), that's all I'm saying. 

Some quick numbers 

• Time played: 1.35 hours (7 or 8 games)
• Maniacal laughs when flipping the switch squished all my opponents: 2
• Times I blew myself up with explosive boomerangs: 9
• Bots required to make it a fair fight: 4
• Rating: 5 diced doughnuts out of ten

The rankings so far

It's not that Boomerang Fu is a bad game. It's not. It's well executed, everything works, and it feels good to play. It's a good addition to my collection that I'm glad I own, but I definitely wouldn't have bought it, because it feels like every one of these party-style brawl games I've ever played. Which is strange, because when I stop and try to name a game that it's like, my mind has been drawing a blank all week. I guess it feels like...Bomberman? Multiplayer Nidhogg? There's nothing in my memory just like this title, and yet somehow every part of me is yelling out that I've seen everything Boomerang Fu has to offer before, and that's not in it's favour.

Let's try it with humans instead of bots some time

1. Trine 4
2. The Wild Eight
3. Boomerang Fu
4. Valfaris
5. Werewolf: The Apocalyse - Heart of the Forest
6. Train Station Renovation

Six down. Six to go. Seven if I mean to intend the Humble Trove title, which I totally do. Next up the dice have declared that we must play game number 9, Valkyria Chronicles 4.

IMHO - Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Heart of the Forest

Next up in our quest to play all of last month's Humble Choice bundle, we have the visual novel that you can tell is going to be a visual novel because the name has a colon AND a dash, Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Heart of the Forest.

Ah, the visual novel, the 21st century answer to the Choose Your Own Adventure story, where instead of 30 Different Endings! you have an unspecified number, but they're probably all pretty much the same. It's hard to quantify exactly how many of these there's been in the Humble Choice lately, as what counts as an adventure game and what is just a straight up VN is a bit of a grey area, but having a game in the same series, Vampire: The Masquerade - Shadows of New York just last month after also having Vampire: The Masquerade - Coteries of New York back in September is honestly just a little on the nose. Truly the Paradox Interactive promotional department is earning their paycheques.

As you might have guessed from the glowing introduction, I'm not much for the visual novel as a genre, which might seem a little odd as I grew up devouring CYOAs, and have played my fair share of MUDs and text adventures. I don't think I want that much, my criteria for what makes a decent visual novel is pretty basic: it has to tell an engaging story, it has to be enhanced by the medium, and the player needs to be able to make choices that matter.  Maybe it's a symptom of being a basic format with a low barrier to entry, making them essentially the fanfiction of the gaming world, but for my money most VNs just seem to fall short of these goals. Or maybe I'm just an old man, not ready to deal with all these new-fangled computermagadjets. Could go either way.

Surprise!

Anyways, how does W:TA-HotF measure up against the aforementioned criteria? I gotta say that the mystery of the protagonist finding out about their family history is kinda spoiled with the word Werewolf in big letters in the title. In the storyline I clicked through the characters felt like they made sense and most of the pieces hung together okay, but I didn't feel like there was a enough narrative drive other than the whole werewolf thing to properly hook me. The pacing was weird too, even more than the usual that you might expect to be brought about by branching storylines, and for a game allegedly about being a werewolf, the whole actually being a werewolf thing was...pretty much irrelevant. By the time I reached an ending I felt like I'd used a character creator, wikied an environmental protest in regional Poland, and read the lore page in the guidebook for an role-playing game rather than actually enjoyed a story, which given that Werewolf: The Apocalypse is mostly a tabletop RPG and that this is a spin-off more geared at building enthusiasm for the main game, actually makes a lot of sense. I'd wonder if this was intended as the first part of an episodic release game, but the whole business model of squeezing these titles out every few months seems to suggest that's not the case.

I also have a small nitpick about how a game that is all about the text probably needs some better copyediting. It wasn't plagued by the google translate problem that so much of the cheap end of Steam is, but it do things like use 'draught' instead of 'drought' throughout, which makes me crazy. I was unsurprised to see the usual suspects in the steam reviews complaining that the protagonist is a woman and the game won't let you play as a proper fascist werewolf, so it at least gets points for that, I guess.

Extremely memeworthy names for varieties of wolf people

The soundscape is unobtrusive but suitably moody, and the distinctive sketch/photo hybrid art style works well to enhance the story without detracting or distracting from it and isn't quite as reliant on various shades of blood red as the screenshots I've grabbed here might indicate, so the sensory elements of this one work well. The RPG-style character sheet functions well enough to help you track things and give hints about what routes you might want to explore, too. I kind of wish there was a way to keep that info on the screen all the time instead of having to click into it, but I don't know it's worth sacrificing the space devoted to artwork to get there. All in all, the VN format suits the story well, and is well executed, so it gets marks in that category.

Having only played through this once, it's hard to judge how much the player choices really matter. Certainly in the storyline I played through I made some pretty suboptimal choices and there didn't really seem to be any consequences in meandering towards a vaguely positive ending. I got my character 'killed' twice, once on purpose to see what would happen, which I would have thought would have some kind of bad outcome, but that didn't seem to put the brakes on either. You are given a couple of status bars to maintain and are told when you're given choices that are due to your character status or relationship with particular groups, which is a good feature that helps helps to make the choices feel less arbitrary, but I can't help the feeling that the game would have ended up pretty much where it ended up if regardless of most of my decisions, and that's a frustrating feeling. 

The art grows on you. The story...

Story: nope. Format: sure. Choices: not so much. I guess one out three ain't bad? Like in The Wild Eight, I'm sure there's more good stuff to discover here, but what I've met so far doesn't encourage me to look any further and I've already spent a bunch more time on this post than I did playing the game.

Some quick numbers 

• Time played: 1.75 hours
• Named characters met that didn't turn out to be werewolves all along: 2
• Times I was told I was the chosen one: 3
• Friends murdered and dismembered: 1
• Rating: 4 trippy dream sequences out of 10

The rankings so far

I can imagine that folks that love the Werewolf: The Apocalypse RPG could be super into this in the way of fans the world over, and it doesn't do all that much wrong; it's a perfectly serviceable visual novel. I guess I still don't like visual novels that much, though.

And then I woke up and found it was all a dream... Or was it?

1. Trine 4
2. The Wild Eight
3. Valfaris
4. Werewolf: The Apocalyse - Heart of the Forest
5. Train Station Renovation

We have played five games and it does not bode well that Valfaris is still number 3 on this list. Next up, the dice have decreed that we will play game number 1...Boomerang Fu.

IMHO - Trine 4

Forget the metrovanias, survival games and simulators that have made up this series so far, it's puzzle platformer time! When I cut my gaming teeth on Super Mario Bros. and Commander Keen, then refined my palate on Oddworld and Heart of Darkness, is it really surprise to anybody when I say that a physics-based puzzle platformer like Trine 4 is very much my jam?

In Trine 4, the player takes the role of three fantasy heroes, the object-summoning wizard, grappling-hook-wielding thief and good-for-hitting-things knight, and must switch between them to progress through various obstacles in a generic fantasy world, searching for a missing generic fantasy prince. Sure, the storyline isn't going to win any awards for originality, the writers were fine with hanging that lampshade and just letting the gameplay, the characters and the art speak for themselves, but when the game looks and feels this good, I'm more than willing to cut them some slack in that department.

How much desktop wallpaper bait can one game feature?

The art is definitely the first thing to mention. I'm not so used to this blogging thing, and normally screenshots for the posts are a bit of an afterthought, but while playing through this game my screenshot folder quickly filled up as I encountered new areas and took the time to soak in the lovingly-rendered 3D backgrounds to this otherwise 2D game. The world feels fun, not realistic but definitely inhabited, and despite so much attention being given to the art it doesn't detract from or confuse the gameplay at all, which is an impressive feat and shows that the art directors at Frozenbyte seriously know their stuff.

Give me more puzzles like this one where I have to use all my characters

The artists are definitely the stars of the show, though. The puzzles which are the meat of the game feel good, the characters react well, the mouse and keyboard control scheme is perfect and the physics system just works, but I can't help feeling just slightly underwhelmed by the challenge provided. In some ways the progression works well, the characters receive a new ability in most levels to put a new spin on the gameplay and the complexity slowly ramps up, but it all feels just a little bit stretched out and a little bit repetitive. This could have been due to the need to make a noticeably longer game after Trine 3, a game that was universally panned for being too short, but I haven't played any of the series before, so to me it just felt like the game started with extremely trivial puzzles and that ones that actually caused me have to stop and think rather than instantly knowing the solution (even if the execution took me a few goes and a few unnecessary deaths) were few and far between. That's possibly even more of a concern given that I didn't already have a couple of essentially identical games under my belt, and I can't help but feel like as well as much as this is a polished title that just works, maybe this series has pretty much shown us everything that it's got in the warehouse and deserves a well-earned retirement. That's a real pity, because the puzzles that do require a new and interesting combination of the character abilities to complete are really very satisfying indeed, I just wish there were more of them.

Now just to work out this last step...

That said, the nature of the linear progression storyline means that getting that balance right is admittedly a difficult problem, and I think Frozenbyte have landed on the right side of it by letting me  finish the campaign without completely grokking the fine details of how all of my abilities worked (the dream rope is weird, man) ,as if a player runs into a puzzle that they cannot solve, they're locked out of the rest of the game. Perhaps in this age of easily accessible Lets Plays and walk-throughs that's not such a bad thing as it used to be, but as a player that steadfastly refuses to use such crutches, my Trine 4 experience could easily have been cut short by any puzzle room too opaque for me to be able to solve just by throwing all my tools at the wall and seeing what sticks.  The designers have made the right choice by putting most of the harder puzzles in optional extra areas, gating bonus goodies rather than quest progression, even if it means many players will miss out on them.

Experience already grabbed shows up as blue drops, so you can tell where you've already been

To encourage players to return an revisit areas they missed, Trine 4 features a handy tracking system that lets you see where you missed the bonus areas and return there instantly later on to collect the goodies, which is super handy. Unfortunately, if you return after collecting the abilities gained during the game, many of these once challenging puzzles become trivial, so even then it's hard to present truly challenging puzzles, except right towards the closing stages of the game. Still, it's enough to make me want to return to this title (maybe after I've gotten a little further ahead in this monthly blogging thing), try to get that elusive 100% and unlock that tempting door in the starting screen, that I hope hides a final set of more difficult levels.

Of course, it's not completely fair to criticise the puzzles just yet, as I'm not playing the game as it's meant to be played. Though single player like I've played through it is an option, Trine 4 is truly designed to be played by a team of two or preferably three, with each player acting as one character and each of them having to be able to support each other to traverse through each level. Apparently the multiplayer version of each level is slightly trickier and the puzzles are inherently more challenging when you can't just cheese them with lucky timing, so I'd love to try it out as it was intended some time. If you've got the game in the bundle this month as well (or if you bought it, I guess) and are interested in giving multiplayer a try, do drop me a line. There's also an 'unlimited' mode for up to 4 players where everyone can be any player at any time, and that just sounds like giggles all round.

I guess it's been a couple of minutes. Time to fight some more...goat people?

You may have noticed that I haven't mentioned the combat, which serves its function of breaking up the puzzles and giving poor Pontius the knight something to do other than stand by while Amadeus and Zora do most of the heavy lifting puzzlewise, but isn't otherwise anything to write home about. It works, but it's definitely the ugly cousin. The first main boss fight of the game was just a puzzle challenge, and while the later ones had some puzzling elements, I can't help but wish that they all had a little more of the platforming and ability interaction and a little less of the 'hit things with your sword' stuff going on.

Some quick numbers

Plenty more where that came from

• Time to finish the main campaign: 9.2 hours
• Completion bar percentage: 61.2%
• Chasms dropped into: A multitude. Some many times.
• Walruses rescued: 1
• Rating: 8 solid 7's out of 10.

The rankings so far

See you next time, heroes of Trine

Another easy one to rank, at least against the competition so far. Even after finishing the game I still feel a compulsion to go back and 100% it, which is a good sign. Perhaps not an all-time favourite, but definitely a solid title worth a few hours of your time.

1. Trine 4
2. The Wild Eight
3. Valfaris
4. Train Station Renovation

Sadly, all good things must come to an end. The dice roll came up with 2, so next up we're playing Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Heart of the Forest.

IMHO - Train Station Renovation

Well, if we were going to try and play all the games in the month then we were going to have to get to it sometime, so we may as well get Train Station Renovation out of the way.

If you're thinking a game called Train Station Renovation doesn't sound all that interesting, then you and I have that in common. It is yet another of these clunky first-person simulator games that Humble in their wisdom appear to have decided that people are clamouring to add to their libraries every single month. Since September, the last time we had a simulator-free bundle, we've had Fantasy Blacksmith, Rover Mechanic Simulator, Tabletop Playground, PC Building Simulator, and now Train Station Renovation back to back. To be fair to these games, they could secretly be amazing and really mix up the formula, I really wouldn't know, as the only other one I actually even tried was Rover Mechanic. But to be fair to me, there's only so many hours in a human life.

The phenomenon of simulation games is a fascinating one. That people will happily spend hundreds or even thousands of hours flying planes through empty skies, trucking or training cargo across the landscape, plowing and seeding and reaping the same field is endlessly astonishing to me, but at least for those sort of things I can see some attractions; perfecting a skill, getting up close and personal with expensive specialised machinery, imagining what could have been had you lived in a different time, place or in different circumstances, or just a little mindless catharsis from an otherwise hectic life. I guess what all these things have in common with model railways and other similar hobbies is the sense of realism, simulating as closely as possible is the name of the game.

Then, of course, there's the spoofs of this genre. The ironic games. The Surgeon Simulators and Goat Simulators that take that idea and make something utterly absurd. I can see the enjoyment of taking a silly idea absolutely as far as you can push it, milking it for all that it's worth.

Access to a dozen tools and more in the truck, but here we are installing a light switch with a spanner

But if you're going to make a simulator, especially one in the very generic first-person mould, you really have to sit in one of these camps, either the realistic or the absurd, and to be honest, the absurd has probably done its dash. Train Station Renovation is trying to be the former, but not trying very hard. It sets the player the mind-numbing, repetitive task of cleaning up abandoned railway stations (surprising, I know) and then asks you to complete it while dealing with a clumsy control set-up with a level of inconsistent realism that is frustratingly jarring. The player can tear out weeds and vines with a single click, but sweeping small areas will take many repetitions. A whole wall can be instantly repainted, but any graffiti will need to be carefully and painstakingly scrubbed away. The player can instantly destroy some debris with a whack of their crowbar, but other types will need to be dragged to the dumpsters and then painstakingly sorted for recycling, and all of them can be instantly replaced by clicking away on your virtual ipad. As a guy who's done my fair share of train station renovation in my time, let me tell you this is just not a very realistic experience. And once you're done with your menial tasks, you're not even rewarded with a train rolling into the station. I'd do a lot for a train rolling into the station.

The satisfaction(?) of a job well done

Basically, I found the whole thing incredibly frustrating. Which is pretty much exactly what I was expecting from a game called Train Station Renovation, so at least the player is getting what they paid for. If you get really excited about making sure every single thing in the world is just perfect, or if even the mention of trains makes you drool and being near digital train tracks makes you drool, go ahead and get it and you'll probably be very happy, like the overwhelming number of Steam reviewers, but personally I think you'd be better off looking for something with a little more meat on its bones. The developers are currently working on Builder Simulator, which looks pretty similar but will allow you to build whole houses brick by brick, maybe you'll want to try that.

Me, I've got other things to do.

Some quick numbers

• Time played: 1.2 hours
• Train Stations Renovated: 2
• Mixed waste skips filled: 4
• Toilets exploded: 2
• Rating: 3 mildly amusing pieces of graffiti out of 10

My suggestion: skip it

The rankings so far

I'm confident that this'll be the lowest-ranked title of the month. Even Valfaris absolutely knew what it wanted to be and went all-out for it:

1. The Wild Eight
2. Valfaris
3. Train Station Renovation

Next up, the dice have determined that we shall play game number 6, Trine 4.

IMHO - The Wild Eight

Snow makes for some great polygons, doesn't it?

Next up in our mission to actually play all the games in this month's Humble Choice bundle, the roll of the dice selected The Wild Eight, a wilderness survival game originally by Fntastic that was acquired by HypeTrain Digital. I'm not typically the kind of player that notices who the developer of a game is, but in the case of this game it's hard to ignore the fact that this game was clearly abandoned and left unfinished, and honestly, that's a real pity, because given a little bit of love, there might just be a germ of something pretty neat here.

Ah, food in a can. My favourite.

The game allows single or multiplayer options, which is neat, and begins with the player(s) waking up in the wreckage of a plane deep in a snowy wilderness and then being pretty much left to their own devices. There's a minimalist tutorial that explains the basics of the interface, though is a little too light on any actual detail on how you might actually go about surviving, meaning new players can expect to die due to cold, starvation, angry wildlife or just falling off a cliff a few times before they work out how to more effectively manage the various threats with their extremely limited inventory. That's fine, though. Die and you'll respawn with all your previous skills, and if you are able to retrieve your corpse you'll be able to regain your stuff as well as a tasty human steak or two. Can't be too picky about the food supply, I suppose.

I'm going to need all those skill points for running away.

The interface is simple enough and workable, the world looks great (I am generally a sucker for anything low-poly), and there's a real sense of there being a lot to do and explore, even if the crafting is pretty basic and the combat in particular leaves a lot to be desired. On first starting out, I definitely got the feeling that this would be a fun game to load into with a couple of friends and see how far we were able to go across the vast landscape, certainly more my pace than Let's Starve Together (pretty much the only game I've ever tried in this genre), but very quickly it became clear that beneath the promising skin was...not very much.

Yes, it's brutal. Your meters run down terribly fast and you're constantly looking for more food, weapons, sources of warmth, and running from wolves and bears that want to eat you among the ruins of civilisation where something has gone very wrong. I'm fine with all that. It's very atmospheric, very cloying, it feels right. What frustrates me is the lack of story. And yeah, I suppose we're probably getting into spoilers from here, so if you'd rather experience it yourself, the short version is that this is a title that, for me, just couldn't deliver what the tasty packaging promised.

Giant purple death cloud. That seems like a good sign.

Still here? Okay, let's dive into what frustrates me about The Wild Eight. Right at the very beginning, the first quest takes you straight to a mysterious high-tech underground bunker. You haven't just crashed in the middle of nowhere, you immediately discover that you've crashed precisely alongside the ending of Lost. The very next step of the quest takes you straight to a radioactive werewolf that wants to eat you, so...that escalated quickly. The next step takes you to a bridge possessed by a giant demon that blows up the bridge, stopping any progress further into content that was never made when the game was abandoned. Yes, really. In three steps, a new player has come straight to the 'end'. That's it. Are there other interesting side quests and mysterious things out there in the darkness to explore and discover? Yes, absolutely. And some of it could even be good. But now that you've taken me to a dead end so quickly (quite literally killing my character in the process), I am utterly uninterested in going any further. It's like seeing the last 2 minutes of a long-drawn out nil-nil draw soccer match and then being asked if I want to go back and watch the whole thing. No thanks! I've got better things to do. 

If I was writing this game, there'd be a cinematic at the start to set the mood. A crash in the middle of nowhere, the fear, the fire. The player character(s) wakes up in the ruins of the plane, scared and alone. They have to find out how to survive while they wait for a rescue. They scrounge while familiarising themselves with the mechanics, they consume their supplies faster than they can replenish them, they meet wildlife and a few abandoned buildings in this vast empty world. It becomes clear no-one's coming to rescue them, so they strike out further, they begin to find some old settlements, fresh graves, corpses in the cold silence. Something weird has happened here. It might still be happening. They find the mysterious bunker and eventually the weird experiments, adding more layers to the basic conceit. The bridge could be out there somewhere, gating new content that might never happen, but don't lead the players straight to it as if you're happily advertising that you forgot to get around to finishing the game. Let finding it and wondering what comes next be a reward to those who explore, those who've experienced a good chunk of the skill trees and the stories strewn around the world, rather than just following the markers set down right at the beginning.

It takes a lot to not like a game that looks this inviting

It's just so frustrating because the elements are all there already, and if they were just spaced out a little, if the tension was allowed to build, if the players were sucked into the narrative, this could have been something really special; a game to suck players like me into a survival genre I wouldn't normally touch with a ten-foot pole, and instead it's a game that was abandoned as soon as it left early access that no-one really cares about.

Which brings me to my next gripe. The Wild Eight (rubbish title, by the way, but maybe it's funnier in the original Russian) was clearly abandoned. It happens to early-access titles by small teams all the time. That's fine. We get it. It sounds like it was a bad situation at the developer that caused the publisher to step in and take over, promising to continue as planned. That's worrying, but it could work. The publisher, HypeTrain Digital, continued to promise that there'd be new content, though, and removed the game from Early Access, got those Day One sales on October 3rd 2019, and released a flurry of bug fixes, with the last one on October 19th. Sixteen days after PC release, as far as I've been able to work out, they disappeared, leaving the game at version 1.0.13. That's it. Leaving an unfinished game full of bugs with a $20 price tag. Then nothing. Until a PS4 release on October 27 2020, more than a year later. And an Xbox One release last month. Gotta get more release-day sales, after all. And all this time not a single update for the PC version, with the Steam news feed for the game only used to advertise their other titles. Frankly, that's no way to treat your customers (many of whom backed the kickstarter that funded the original development), it's transparently exploitative and shows how little you care about the customer after you've sold them on an admittedly shiny trailer, and if I ever actually bought games I'd absolutely be refusing to buy another title from HypeTrain Digital. 

It makes me wonder. What are Humble doing promoting and distributing a game with this sort of track record? Why are Humble, a company that talks up their contributions to charity and their support of 'awesome' games, sullying their reputation promoting a publisher that are just in it for a quick buck? I know it's absurd to expect a big corporation to care about such things, and I know I'm just an old man yelling at cloud for all the good it will do, but I, for one, would much prefer a smaller bundle of better-quality games from developers that actually care about their product and their customers, and for Humble not to put their backing behind publishers that don't deserve to have their game in my library.

Killed out of the blue just as I was setting out from home. Seems appropriate.

Some quick numbers

• Time played: 3.6 hours
• Trees punched: 16
• Polar bears butchered: 2
• Player deaths: 5
• Rating: 6 jars of chilled peanut butter out of 10

The rankings so far

Well, that was quite a rant, wasn't it? Sorry about that. Time to rank the games, and despite all my complaints, when it comes down to sheer personal enjoyment, this is definitely going above Valfaris. It's just that that enjoyment comes with a sense of frustration over what could have been. If the developer ever releases the rights to allow fans to build something actually good out of this, I'd probably play the hell out of it.

1. The Wild Eight 
2. Valfaris

On to the next one then. The next dice roll is ... 7 - Train Station Renovation?

My Humble Opinion

I've been subscribed to the Humble Monthly bundle for a few years now. As someone who never shells out for games it's been a great way to pick up a random selection of slightly older but excellent titles to play, many of which I'd never have picked up for myself but don't mind trying out, and through it I've discovered some real gems that have occupied far too much of my time and brain space.

In theory this should help me from falling into a pattern of playing the same old games, but lately I've been finding that I'm back in that rut a little, only now I have an ever-increasing pile of unplayed games in a pile and the monthly subscription is starting to feel a little wasteful. I've played very few of the titles from the last few months, and honestly, I'm not sure I'm missing out on all that much.

So I thought it might be fun to set myself a goal for March of forcing myself to spend a little time, let's call it at least an hour, with each of the games in the February bundle, write a little about my thoughts, and hopefully decide if the monthly bonanza is still worth my hard earned $12 a month. For some reason this month's bundle dropped a little early, though, so I guess I have March-and-a-bit to try out the games.

Both my fellow Blaugustine humble connoisseurs Magi and Naithin had good things to say about this bundle in their previews, so hopefully this'll bode well for the monthly selection. Without any further ado, then, let's roll the dice and see what comes up...

Oh dear. It's Valfaris. What a start.

Conan the Barbarian. In Space. In Neon. In Neon Space.

Just from the cover art I can tell exactly what this is going to be, and that it 100% isn't going to be my thing. Bright flashing lights. Blood everywhere. Heavy Metal soundtrack you Can't Turn Off. Looks like it might have the tagline "Not your daddy's castlevania", but since it apparently is a castlevania-type platformer at least they've got the branding spot-on to attract the people that like this sort of thing.

Yes, even the spaceship is covered in blood.

Once I got through intro video featuring our mysterious hero out for revenge deliberately crash-landing his revengeship on the revenge planet to do some revenging, it turns out Valfaris plays a little bit more like a Metal Slug game than I was expecting. I like the Metal Slug games, they know that they're ridiculous and play that for laughs. Valfaris appears to revel in the madness in an earnestly fullthroated way that just exudes heavy metal. The bottom half of enemies you dismember continue to walk around spraying blood all the while, the soundtrack does not let up (it turns out you CAN turn it off, but if this game is your scene I suspect it'd be better cranked up to eleven instead), and the difficulty ramps up extremely quickly. I must have died 10 times in my first ten minutes of play, distracted by the throbbing lights and general intensity of my surroundings.

And the headbanging, the headbanging...

Valfaris is a game that knows what it is and leans into it hard, and I have to admire that, but I'd prefer to admire that from a safe distance, if that's all the same to you. I managed about a half-hour and a couple of mini-bosses into this hypermetalfest before I gave up, quit, and uninstalled, happy to never think about this one ever again. Does that count as a fair showing? Well, I've given it a go and I am pretty confident I've seen everything I have any interest in seeing, so that will just have to do. If I were to give myself a minimum time spent on each game then too many hours of games like this one might make my head explode, so let's quit while we still have braincells. I guess I'm just not very metal, to the surprise of everyone who knows me, I'm sure.

I only ticked off one Steam Achievement for this game, the one for successfully dying. Seems about right.

Well, that wasn't a great start. On to the next game, I suppose...