Category Archives: Game Reviews

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Raiders of the Lost Acropolis

So for Christmas, I was generously gifted a lovely two player game called Akrotiri. I’m a little hard pressed for two player board games and given that Kait’s really the only one willing to play with me, it’s been a boon to get some new games in my collection to vary our options. Course this has come with the uncomfortable realization that my sister tends to beat me at head-to-head games. She was dominating in the two player Agricola version called All Creatures Big and Small. Then she got Caverna Cave vs Cave which she’s been sneaking out last minute successes each time we open it. Now we’ve got Akrotiri though at least I’ve managed to secure a few victories so far.

However, since those other board games aren’t mine, I haven’t done a review on them. Akrotiri is, so I got to share my thoughts today on what it’s like.

First off, I kind of like it. The game is quite different from the others that I’ve played. It’s not a worker placement, which is the primary source of competition in the 2 player Agricola and Caverna. Those games are primarily about trying to optimise your farm or cave build while potentially taking important actions from your opponent so they’re less optimal. While Akrotiri isn’t particularly aggressive in its mechanics, I do feel there’s a bit more back and forth play with it than the others which lean pretty heavily on being hands off of your opponents actions.

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Akrotiri is designed by Jay Cormier and Sen-Foong Lim. It is published by Z-man Games and rights belong somewhere amongst them all.

For one, Akrotiri is played in a single space. Players don’t have their own little cave to putter away on. You’re slowly building the map of Akrotiri with each turn, creating an expanding island infested Aegean with strict trade routes that your boats can sail. As such, there’s two ways you can interfere with your opponents movement. One, you can block docks by parking on them in your own turn, denying your enemy access unless they happen to be holding a tile that they can use to open up a new space. Second, you can redirect incomplete trade routes to other islands with your tile placements. You always get to place a tile before you take your little trade vessel around the sea, however, so you’re not going to get locked away unless you really outplay yourself.

But what exactly are we trying to do in Akrotiri. This game does rely on accumulating more points than your opponent and you accomplish this by funding expeditions to unearth lost temples on the tiny islands dotting your tile build sea. But before your little venture in tomb raiding can commence, you need to first find where your temples are buried. This involves drawing map cards which will give you requirements to fulfil for you to place your temple. Each map simply lists the number of element tiles needed in each cardinal direction that must be satisfied with your temple placement. Since each tile has a single element on it, this puts pressure on your tile placement to not just block your opponent but to fulfil your map conditions so you can progress through your expeditions. The game ends once one player has successfully unearthed six temples but depending on the type of map, your temples are worth different amount of points.

It sounds confusing but once you start playing, you find the rules themselves are pretty straightforward. For example, I might have an easy map that requires I have two fire tiles to the right of my temple, one tree south of it and a water tile to the north. I can build my temple on any non-excavated island so long as one of the quadrants of that tile meets these criteria. You can even use that tile’s own element assuming it falls in the right direction. Course, just because the rules are easy doesn’t mean that the game is.

As you place your temples, you are rewarded with extra abilities. Most of these are giving you additional actions during your turn but you also get to draw more goal cards as you progress. These cards are hidden from your opponent and let you score additional points for fulfilling additional requirements for your temple placements. They’re things like building a temple on an island with a tree element or gain a point for each tile used to build that island. If you’re lucky or sly you can really accumulate a lot of points with these bonus goals.

And this is where one of my major complaints with Akrotiri arises. Our games have been entirely determined by these goal cards however its entirely random how you get them. You draw two cards from the deck and pick one to keep and one to discard. So it’s possible your opponent can just draw into a winning card as their final goal and you couldn’t do anything about it. Alternatively, you might just draw nothing but dead goals that means you’re playing at a severe disadvantage in the game. So far we’ve found that the goals of building temples a certain number of portages away from the central island to be really bad because their point value is pretty minor considering that your opponent can fairly easily disrupt these requirements by laying tiles to make them directly connected.

Thus, a lot of the strategy my sister and I have discovered is trying to determine which goals they have and attempting to block them. By the end of the game you will know what they have but this element requires memorizing twelve different scoring goals. Which mostly means we spend a lot of the game looking at the back of the rulebook. I like this element of deducing what your opponent is doing, I’m just less of a fan of so much chance determining who will win.

There is an additional layer of strategy in that you need money to fund these expeditions for the lost temples. Money is accrued through the collection of resources from freshly placed tiles. These resources correspond with the element of the tile. So placing a fire tile requires that you put one fire resource on its quadrant. You also have your choice of another resource to place anywhere else on that tile. And the value of resources increases with each cube removed from the market and scattered across the map. In this way, it’s advantageous to double up on the resource shared with the tile, assuming you can gathered both of them and don’t leave the extra lying around for your opponent to grab.

As you can see, the different tactical considerations increase as the map expands. If you’re placing tiles to stop certain islands from meeting your opponent’s hidden goals, you may be leaving them easy to collect resources to fund their expeditions. If you’re trying to lay tiles to meet the requirements of your maps then you may be leaving your opponent to fully gather in another direction or fulfil their hidden agendas.

Then there’s the question of what kind of temples you pursue. The maps for finding their locations come in three different difficulties: easy, medium and hard. The points increase for each type of map but so does the cost of purchasing them. Hard maps cost nine gold to purchase, cost gold to fund the expedition and have harder requirements to place them. However, they’re also worth seven points in the end. If you manage to place that temple to meet one or more of your agendas, you can get a temple that’s worth more than ten points alone. Unfortunately, the longer it takes for you to place your temples, the more time your opponent has to find theirs. If you’re not fast enough, your opponent can unearth a bunch of smaller temples but close the game out while you have lost points for not excavating your last ones.

It’s a delicate balance of pushing for the higher valued maps while also placing pressure on your opponent to make less ideal decisions to keep up. And, of course, if you can figure out where an opponent is trying to build you can swoop in and claim that island for your own excavation if you happen to have a map that fulfils that requirement. It’s not simply of getting the biggest, most expensive maps.

However, since so much of the game is reliant on map chicanery, my other big complaint with the game is that there’s not a lot to do in the first couple of turns. You don’t even get to place a helpful tile if you’re second player. The game setup requires both players place one tile before the first player takes their turn. So, as second player, you don’t want to place yours so the enemy can gather your resources. Neither Kait nor I have really discovered a good use of that first turn and it’s very easy to basically just pass it without doing anything. So while I like the dynamics of creating the map and the strategy involved, I would have like something more interesting to do at the beginning.

Accessed from https://icv2.com/images/27788Akrotiri_LG.jpgAkrotiri does have an interesting pace, however. The start of the game is a bit slow as you’re low on funds, tiles to meet temple requirements and resources to collect. You’re left looking for any action to take rather than good actions. However, things ramp up very quickly as you start unearthing temples and start getting more and more actions per turn. By the final two temples, you have six actions to take and between portages, resource gathering and excavations, it’s very easy to lose track of how many actions you’ve done or what you were trying to accomplish. It’s not uncommon for your opponent to suddenly excavate two surprise temples in one round and end the game while you’re still plotting how to orient the tile you’ve just picked up!

Overall, I really enjoy Akrotiri. It’s really different from the other two player games that I’ve played. It’s a little on the long side, however. Cave vs Cave feels like a faster experience especially since a lot of our time is spend mentally rotating map tiles and trying to figure out how many actions it takes to navigate a trade route. But outside of the goal cards, it’s a pretty strategy heavy game. The randomization of tile and map draws aren’t too bad since you have some control over them, whether that be through purchasing more maps or spending an action to call for a specific element tile.

Now it’s just a matter of scrapping a few more victories from my sister’s slumming strategy of only unearthing cheap but easy temples to finish the game before I can found my glorious places of worship!

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A Tale of Madness and Mythos

Well something magical happened over the holidays. My family and I were able to find enough time to sit down and work through a new little game called Mythos Tales.

Course, this game isn’t really new. I believe in released in 2016. What’s more, it was released in the same genre as another game I’ve discussed at length on this blog: Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective. In fact, the game is essentially Consulting Detective but instead of investigating the twisted streets of London you are hunting down the insane footsteps of cultists on the fictional streets of Arkham. All the familiar trappings of Consulting Detective have returned but this isn’t simply a reskinning in Lovecraftian lore. Mythos Tales takes several bold strides to separate itself from the genre’s founder. Some of these changes work. Some of them don’t.

The game is shorter than Consulting Detective. Only eight mysteries await in the tentacle covered box. Nine if you have the bonus kickstarter mystery called The Faceless Expedition. It does, however, contain a map of Arkham, a directory, a collection of newspapers and the casebook. There are, however, a few additional elements.

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Mythos Tales belongs to Hal Eccles, 8th Summit and some other people while taking heavy inspiration from Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Prime among them is the time tracker. Mythos Tales takes a curious approach to try and address the major shortcoming of Consulting Detective. Cases have a time limit and each location you seek will draw you towards an inevitable conclusion to your investigations. These vary depending on the case presented but you generally have between four and six days to get to the root of whatever evil is currently besieging the little Massachusetts town known for its plague of eldritch horrors and despicable witches. Each day is further broken down into morning, afternoon and evening.

There is also a small deck of cards called Requirements. Both the time tracker and requirement cards feature in all the cases and represent the biggest shift in gameplay. My feelings on these two important elements kind of tie into my overall feelings of the whole experience. Sometimes they work. Often times they don’t. I like the experimentation even if I’m not tickled with the overall results.

Let’s start with the good. Requirement cards are my jam. I had some issue with Consulting Detective, especially in the West End Case Files, where the mysteries were getting a bit convoluted due to the nature of the game’s setup. Since the scenario writer is unable to know the exact sequence players will investigate locations, they often write each location on a nebulous expectation that it’s the first place you’ve visited in the case. This means if you happen to, say, find some mysterious white powder at the crime scene, going to the forensic pathologist may or may not actually work out depending on the mood of the writer. The pathologist may be preemptively analyzing the white powder which, if you happen to visit him before the crime scene can be baffling when he’s discussing details of the case you haven’t uncovered yet but treating you as if you have. On the other hand, the scenario writer may just have the pathologist never say a word about any white powder and you’re meant to use Sherlock Holmes’ alien space brain to predict that you’re supposed to visit the taxidermist about it because obviously that’s where you take strange white dirt.

Mythos Tales sidesteps this issue. During the course of the investigation, you’ll come across people who will give you a generic greeting and information for your first visit but the end of their section might contain further instruction for the reader. Generally this reads as, “If you possess Requirement Card 1, proceed to supplementary encounters on page 42 and read encounter 3.” This effectively allows you to follow-up on clues and discoveries without having to worry about the order players travel to locations. The only downside, and it’s pretty minor, is that if you visit the pathologist and don’t have the request requirement card, you know there exists something out there that he can shed further light on. However, this bit of meta knowledge isn’t necessarily helpful. Oftentimes these supplementary encounters aren’t always fruitful and this can be a gameplay trap due to nibbling away at your time tracker.

Which brings me directly to that new mechanic.

I’m less enthused about the time tracker. I understand why it exists. It gives a general idea of the complexity of the case Armitage, your Sherlock Holmes replacement with significantly less character, will inform you of the approximate number of steps you’ll need to solve the case before setting out on it. There is a hard limit, so you can’t somehow get wrapped up in sideplots so much that you end up running the additional step penalty to the point of not even wanting to finish the adventure. It’s a way to ensure that players don’t try and read every entry in the game. They literally cannot since the case’s conclusion comes at the time tracker’s conclusion regardless of their progress.

Unfortunately, I don’t feel the time tracker is as smoothly integrated as the requirement cards. Both will shape player actions in ‘unnatural’ ways but the time tracker is more intrusive. The requirement cards simply make players want to find whatever card they’re missing in order to come back to the location it was needed at to learn what they couldn’t access. It can sometimes feel like you’re playing “Where is card 6?” instead of trying to logically follow the case (and trying to guess what the card would even represent based on where it was needed). The time tracker, however, puts unnecessary pressure on the player. Oh, you haven’t solved the case yet and you have three more steps to go? You’ll probably start lashing out erratically trying to find some magical location that will allow you to stumble into the solution instead of properly following up your leads. Even worse, the game tries to incorporate the time into several of the cases. Some locations can’t be accessed except at certain times of the day or on certain dates. If you arrive early then you’ll feel the siren song of curiosity drawing you back on the date you should have visited even if you had no good reason to do so outside of the directions given in the location’s entry.

Even worse, however, is the fact that the time tracker double punishes missteps in the adventure. Not only are you evaluated on the amount of time that you spend on the case (and receive point penalties at the end for going longer than Armitage much in the same way you are with Sherlock) but each false lead also eats into your allotted time for the case and could simply run you off the clock before you can properly solve it. So, you lose a point for going to the wrong location for the point tally and you lose the time that would be needed to follow the proper path to the conclusion. And woe betide you if you need to visit a location at night but the case concludes in the afternoon and you only learned of this requirement after your final nighttime step!

I liked that the game tries to make a day/night cycle more important to gameplay and an additional consideration of when you want to visit certain locations. But trying to wiggle your investigation around these time restrictions especially given the free form nature you learn about them is far too fussy and punitive to the player. For me, the few cases we failed often hinged on the fact we skipped a location we learned about early on and never went back to it because we felt we wouldn’t have enough time to track down any leads it would dovetail into as our time tracker was nearly filled.

Accessed from https://boardgamestories.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/pic3055418_lg.jpgPerhaps the best use of the time tracker was as a way to adjust the difficulty of consecutive missions. If you scored poorly on a mission, then next case you investigated often had a small handicap afforded to you to make it a little easier. This would be either reducing the number of locations you were penalized for visiting by one, allowing you an extra time slot for visiting locations or giving you a free requirement card for the case. On the flip side, if you were proving to be far more competent than even Armitage, you would be handicapped by having less time on the next case by starting with your time tracker advanced one space.

There were also several tokens that came with the time tracker that were never used which I thought was a bit weird.

These were the biggest changes to the game. However, there were several smaller ones that I thought were a bit interesting. A lot of the cases had unique game elements strictly for that case – explained before you started out on them, of course. In one you had to deal with poison. Another you could give chase to a suspect after certain encounters. Perhaps the most interesting one was a mystery that focused on passing into the dreams of the town’s inhabitants and exploring their dream version of Arkham. All the relevant locations in that mystery had a corresponding dream version that you could visit and had drastically different encounters associated with them. It’s almost a shame these elements didn’t come up in later cases though I can understand that the additional complexity would simply be too much to handle from a scenario creation standpoint.

Finally, and this isn’t a new mechanic or anything, Mythos Tales does a far better job of outlining what exactly you’re expected to do with each mystery. One of my long standing complaints with Sherlock is you have no idea what you’re going to be asked at the end and, since Sherlock sets the questions, you’re playing from a massively disadvantaged position. Mythos Tales makes this far more fair. First, Armitage does a very good job of making explicit what you’re supposed to do. At the end of each case introduction, he’ll tell you exactly what he expects for you to solve. If a painting were missing, his closing remarks would likely be directing you to identify who the thief was, where the painting went and why they stole it. That way you know you don’t need to waste any time worrying about how the theft was performed since it isn’t a primary concern for Armitage.

Second, Armitage is explicitly incapable of answering all the questions at they end. They’re not based on his investigation but based on the overall mystery itself. My estimation is that Armitage can answer about seventy percent of the questions but there are a fair number of points to accumulate for going off his beaten track and learning elements that he won’t know. Course, the danger in trying to strategize around this hole in Armitage’s method is that you don’t know what these questions are until the end and the primary questions always award the most points. So it’s important to listen to wise, grumbling Armitage and focus on his directions.

Now that we’ve covered the good and interesting aspects, let’s dig into the bad.

The biggest problem with Mythos Tales is actually the biggest problem facing Consulting Detective: bad writing. Mythos Tales has about four cases that are solid from my experience. Unfortunately it has three that are pretty bad with one of them literally unplayable because of bad writing. And the problems in Mythos Tales are possibly more egregious than Consulting Detective. Forewarning, you can’t solve the sixth case. Straight up, there is no path through the mystery that lets you answer the questions posed. Armitage’s path makes no sense in that he literally can’t follow the locations provided at the end because he doesn’t gain the requirement cards needed for them by where he goes. Furthermore, one requirement card that’s necessary for the solution isn’t even available anywhere in the entire case! It’s a shocking case of everything going horribly wrong on a production side that I’m surprised at least some of its errors weren’t discovered before print. Ignoring case six, however, there are others with missing locations in the directory, spelling errors on names so you can’t find them, locations on the map with the same number or no number so you don’t know where some places are and other minor errors that can have a pretty big impact on the case depending on their importance or perceived importance.

These careless errors stand out in starker contrast since the rest of the game is so careful otherwise. At least you come to expect bullshit from Sherlock that when it comes up again, you aren’t taken unaware. But Mythos Tales has a solid first couple of cases before the quality of the writing takes a noticeable drop. So if you do decide to play Mythos Tales, it’s unfortunate but you need to search through the internet for errata to make some cases playable.

Accessed from https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/91sV2laHPnL._SX466_.jpgAnd I’m just going to say it: the newspapers were dead useless in this game. They felt like they were tacked on because Consulting Detective had them. I think, once again, the time tracker is partly at fault since you can’t have obtuse clues hidden in papers since players are so pressed for time they’ll never investigate longshot possibilities in the print. So it simply isn’t feasible to build cases around using them.

As for the difficulty, I found that overall Mythos Tales was a lot easier than Consulting Detective. Our results support my impressions too. I think we only failed two cases and one of them was the aforementioned impossible to solve case. Two or three we scored within Armitage’s expected window (even including the hilarious bonus mission where we got ‘Cthulhu devoured’). The rest we crushed Armitage in. Granted, it sometimes felt like we cheated in those and this is due to a unique issue with Mythos Tales. I, personally, am a fan of Lovecraft’s work having read a lot of it over the years. As such, I was able to pick up on the Lovecraftian elements and references pretty quickly. Other players wouldn’t. So they may need to hit up more locations trying to understand the relevance of Dagon references whereas I knew immediately what the writers were implying and the implications it had on the case. Oftentimes this meant I would be able to get us some free points in the end by answering some minor questions without needing to resort steps or time in researching them.

But despite this unique weakness of the game, I felt that the cases were pretty straightforward anyway. I’m not sure if this is a necessity due to the constraints enforced by the time tracker (you can’t have surprise twists if people are trying to manage their incredibly limited time) or by the fact that all the mysteries rely on some supernatural element (you can’t use deduction on things that are, inherently, illogical). Overall, most cases didn’t really use the supernatural element all that well, either. For most it was window dressing, though the several cases that executed their mystical elements well were certainly highlight cases of the box.

I’d say I liked Mythos Tales more than Consulting Detective and I know my family greatly appreciated the fairer cases even if they could have done without all the tentacle dressings. Mythos Tales isn’t really a refinement of the genre but it does add its own twists and elements that make it a worthwhile foray to explore. I’m not certain I’d jump at a sequel partly due to the quality of the later cases. If one were realized, I’d certainly wait on others impressions before looking into it. However, more than anything, I think Mythos Tales demonstrates that the game systems of Consulting Detective are flexible enough that they can be applied more broadly and that the systems themselves are still pretty fun even without major changes to them.

Until next time, happy hunting detectives.

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We Can Stop Digging, Watson

Awhile ago, I reviewed Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective. Well, if you hadn’t enough of my complaining about the original game, my family and I have finally gotten through the expansion Jack the Ripper and West End Adventures.

If you want a short, sweet summary of the experience: it’s worse than the first. Which is quite a feat considering how sour my family was towards the original game.

Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective: Jack the Ripper & West End Adventures is the product of Asmodee and a bunch of others that aren’t me.

But if you haven’t read my prior review and you want more than “it sucked” then buckle up because I have a lot of thoughts about the experience.

First, a quick rundown of what Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective is. The game is quite different from your normal tabletop games. This is an (ostensibly) detective game about solving a crime by listening to descriptions or testimonies at various places and by a revolving cast of characters. The idea is pretty neat and certainly something that would be up my mystery obsessed family’s alley. The conceit is that you’re a member of Holmes’ Baker Street Irregulars. These rapscallion street urchins are known for running tasks for Holmes but in the game you’re promoted to assistant consulting detectives and are given the same premise to the mystery as Holmes before being set loose into the streets of London to come up with your own explanation for how and why the crime took place.

And, more often than not, you’ll come to a better conclusion than Holmes. But more about that later.

The only tools you have available to solve the case is a map of London with various locations demarcated with a number, a directory, a list of Sherlock Holmes’ famous allies, the newspaper for the day and the case book which contains the meat of the adventure. After listening to the introduction of your case, you will look up locations on the map or by searching the directory for the address of potential suspects then consult the corresponding number in the case book. In this way you simulate the experience of crossing the busy streets of the Victorian Empire’s capital. And when you start running into some frustrating dead ends in your investigation, you can crack open the papers to get some additional clues to get you back on track.

Now, the game aspect of Consulting Detective is that you’re ostensibly in a competition with Holmes trying to solve the mystery before he does. And this aspect is what brings the whole experience crashing down on a fundamental level. But I’ll be addressing this portion of the game later since it’s an inherent problem in the original release that was only exacerbated with the expansion.

The expansion itself, however, is distinctly split into two experiences. The first four cases concern the infamous Jack the Ripper case and is the first instance of a crossover between Sir Conan Doyle’s fictitious character and a real world event. The latter section of the case is six additional cases set in the same style as the original game. It’s these adventures I’ll address first.

When comparing the West End Adventure to the original Consulting Detective collection, all three of us were grossly disappointed with the offerings. The writing is still the largest stumbling block but, more than anything, I found that these cases were simply far less inspiring than the original ten cases. We basically solved all of them within three locations in the book and they really didn’t feel as developed as the originals. Since I was the sole keeper of the case book, I also happened to notice that all of them were on the thinner end of the spectrum with all six approximately the same length as The Munitions Magnate and about as interesting. The Munitions Magnate I felt was a pretty good case solely because it worked as an excellent introduction to the game and its mechanics. The case itself is pretty dry and West End Adventures doesn’t really find any way to sprinkle some excitement into the mix.

In fact, outside of Dr. Goldfire and the Murder of Sherlock Holmes, I’m having a hard time remembering them despite having played them only last week. And of those two, I’d say only the Murder of Sherlock Holmes is interesting. I just remember Dr. Goldfire because it sounded like a James Bond villain.

Give me a sec as I look them up…

Jeez, even looking up their names I don’t even remember what A Simple Case of Murder was about. Oh, digging further I was confusing Savage Club with A Simple Case.

And that’s exactly the issue with this expansion. The only reason that The Murder of Sherlock Holmes stands out is because of its use of a theatre as a location for interviewing multiple witnesses/suspects. It felt like a missed opportunity since you’re given so much information concerning the theatre layout and suspect locations when all that information really isn’t relevant.

Contrasting these cases with the originals and there differences between their quality is quite stark. The Mystified Murderess (despite it being a written mess) at least had a rather unique concept. The Lionized Lions was my favourite simply for its cute setup. The Cryptic Corpse really hit a traditional Sherlock Holmes vibe and the details of The Pilfered Paintings were pretty amusing. Even with the annoyances of The Banker’s Quietus, The Mummy’s Curse and The Solicitous Solicitor, I’d say we found them at least okay. I’d say the only one we truly hated was the Thames Murders. And with those cases part of our frustration was trying to play the game “by design.”

West End Adventures, however, are all feel pretty much the same. There’s also the unfortunate issue that they’re pretty predictable too. Several start without an actual murder but you know you’re going to come across one pretty early on regardless. The lack of depth in these cases even reflects in Sherlock’s awful solutions. He resolves all of them within four or five clues because there’s really just not that much going on with them.

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They’re bad and had the original release been on the level of West End Adventures, I can’t imagine the game ever being recommended.

The Jack the Ripper files, however, are a bit interesting. For one, there designers did some research into enacting some measure of authenticity so the nature of the cases is starkly different from the rest of the Consulting Detective cases. You’re going to be reading through gritty details and unreliable witnesses and testimonies. Here, the red herrings don’t feel like cheating because there’s a much stronger feeling of authenticity to its presentation. These four are certainly the strongest of the cases and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this is due to the writers being constrained to actually following a real life case and thus don’t have some absolutely idiotic events occur.

Granted, Sherlock Holmes’ solution is completely asinine but that should be expected from anything carrying the Consulting Detective name.

But there’s some extra details that make the Ripper files stand head and shoulders above the rest. First, there’s a distinct change in the nature of playing the game. You’re provided far more visual aids in those four cases and are expected to pull out details and clues from those aids. It really helps to clear up some of the ambiguity which arose from the purely written accounts that can lead to contradictions in the rest of the cases. It also makes the newspapers a lot more interesting to read.

However, there’s a second element unique to the Ripper files that really needed to be expanded to the whole of Consulting Detective. You have the ability to follow up individuals about specific clues or questions!

Granted, due to the nature of the game, these follow up questions are pretty restricted but it’s a fantastic addition that really makes the game a better experience. Before the Ripper files, if you came across an important clue you had no ability to find further information about it. Say, after some detective work, you came across the name of a likely suspect there really wasn’t any way to ask the police about that suspect since the designers couldn’t know if you were visiting the police before or after learning of said suspect. With the Ripper files, however, there are many passages that come with some cryptic directions if you’re arriving at a location for a specific reason. Say, for example, you learn about a shady individual named Derek the Dirk who was seen in the area of one of the murdered women. When you go to speak to Inspector Lestrade, you will still get his generic chest puffing about how you ruffians shouldn’t be in his precinct. But at the bottom of the passage you might be rewarded with a little bold text reading, “If you are looking for information concerning Derek the Dirk then go to the location in this district corresponding with the number of the location you last heard about Derek the Dirk.”

Granted, if you’ve come to Lestrade before hearing about Derek, then you might be more vigilante about this missing Derek character from your investigation. However, after going through the casebook after the investigation, I found that there were some red herrings that you could investigate as well which adds that necessary element of ambiguity where you can’t know if following the lead on Derek the Dirk is a waste of time or not. And having a more responsive investigation is certainly worth the trade-off.

Course, none of this addressed Consulting Detectives true issue. It’s scoring system is a mess. The West End Adventures are even more of a mess than the originals. My mom kept saying that Sherlock cheats and it wasn’t until this set of cases that I finally came around to her point of view.

First, for Jack the Ripper and West End Adventures, we decided to play the game the way everyone recommends: ignore the scoring. But in doing so, I only came to see how incredibly arbitrary and awful the scoring really is.

Part of the problem is inconsistency. There were two cases where Sherlock admonished Wiggins for attempting to come up with a motive for the crimes. The very next case one of the primary questions asked at the end was about the culprit’s motive. Consulting Detective is constantly doing these contradictions. It sets up a sense of expectation in one case and in the very next it will break all the rules it had established. Sometimes the method a crime was committed is incredibly important. Sometimes, it doesn’t matter how an impenetrable safe is broken into with a dozen witnesses in the area and no explanation given at the end for how it was compromised by the guilty parties. Sherlock cheats in this manner by dictating what and when something will be important and, without providing the questions ahead of time, there’s simply no way for the player to know what incongruities are due to the game’s design or simply bad writing. In one case, we had followed Holmes’ steps exactly but kept hunting down clues because we erroneously assumed we had to unmask the location or true identity of the criminal because literally every other case until that point expected those answers. And this time Holmes considered it unimportant… simply because.

I’ve put a lot of thought into the game aspect of Consulting Detective because it is so bad that it detracts from the experience. And I’m not certain there’s a satisfactory answer beyond simply getting better designers and writers. What is clear is that Consulting Detective does a horrendous job of ultimately making clear what you’re supposed to actually do in the game. And this is inexcusable considering they’ve published twenty cases and have had plenty of time to figure out a good method of doing so.

But I’m going to share my idea for a better way.

First, during the introduction of a case, the writers should drop most of the extraneous fluff and spend more time actually making clear what exactly the players are tasked to do. To use an example of what not to do, the Savage Club case is too vague. You leave understanding that there’s some sort of Bohemian Scandal setup for the adventure. You’re contact by a princely individual who wants you to address some embarrassing situation before it can get out. But the Savage Club doesn’t make clear what you need to do to stop that embarrassment. Do you need to reclaim the necklace? Do you need to prove the necklace was stolen? Do you need to retrieve the letters? Do you need to prove the letters were stolen and not intended for their current owner?

Accessed from http://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/content/ve/sherlock-holmes/images/B2-Art_Spaget_1.jpg

Original Sherlock Holmes art by Sidney Paget

Since there’s no clear indication of what will solve this case, it will naturally lead to players meandering blindly all the while Sherlock knows immediately what needs to be done. Every player should finish the introduction to a case and know exactly what the first two questions in the back of the book are going to be. If this means Sherlock has to turn to the Baker Street Irregulars and literally spell out, “I’m leaving you, Wiggins, to find out who killed our victim and how” then so be it. Then players can properly go to scene and start deducing answers with this directed focus.

Second, if you’re going to have a competition with Sherlock Holmes over solving the case then Sherlock should spend a lot more time engaging with the damn case. That Sherlock solved most of his in four steps and the designers expect you to do the same is asinine. The designers are literally creating a game to not be played. There are so many locations to visit and sub plots to uncover that players are directly encouraged to ignore. It’s bad design. It’s also even worse that Sherlock will make broad proclamations about the case without actually having the evidence to make those claims. This goes contrary to the character and even contradicts a lot of his advice throughout the game. If the designers wanted a detective who made wild assumptions and didn’t bother to “eliminate the impossible” to find the truth. Holmes’ most famous quote is to basically hunt down leads and prove they’re wrong. Yet in the game he never, ever does that. He just magically finds a path that can make sense and doesn’t even examine whether there’s an “improbably but truthful” alternative.

So Sherlock should have some steps to corroborate witness testimony, to ensure his theories are sound and eliminate other possibilities. Sherlock should literally be used to demonstrate to players how to engage with the game and solve the case. No one is bedazzled when Sherlock pulls some nonsense solution especially when it’s trivially easy to go through the locations he did to come to his conclusions.

There should also be some consistency in his allies. It’s also asinine that only three allies are ever actually useful. Why are over half his allies “not in their office” for most of the cases. Why even bother putting them on a list to consult. Players shouldn’t have to guess when an ally is going to be important or not. Basically, what we learned is that Porky and Langdale Pike are the only really important allies to visit and basically you rotate between them for each case. And the fact that one in twenty cases requires you to visit the Carriage Court but there’s literally never anything to gleam from it otherwise is also stupid. Especially if there are no witnesses to at least suggest you should check out the movement of carriages by seeing a suspect climb into one.

Instead, all allies should be useful in some manner. Make most of them like Sherlock which give helpful hints pertaining to the case but aren’t necessary to visit. Make some of them consistently give direction to the sub plots that are bonus questions at the end. I like that Porky often asks you to look into elements pertaining to the case but from a wholly different direction and more of the allies should do that. That way, when you do get to the end, you aren’t completely baffled by some of those bonus questions which can seemingly come out of nowhere.

Finally, there should be far more consistency in how information is presented. It’s frustrating trying to find the right witness who will actually describe what a body looks like, especially when it’s a moment when Wiggins actually looks at the body himself! Anytime a new character is introduced, there should be some measure of important information provided so that witness testimonies for height, hair, accent and build can be easily determined. Also it’s bullshit that you can have someone interact with an individual to such an intimate degree like removing a bullet from them and they can’t even tell you their god damn hair colour!

There shouldn’t be one exact way to solve a case but many different angles that you can approach it. This does mean keeping track of all the minute details but that’s exactly what Sherlock Holmes is about.

The game ultimately should be designed in a fair, engaging and fun way that encourages people to think and analyse the information they’re given. There’s potential here that is absolutely squandered in the shoddy writing and it’s simply inexcusable for a game that requires consistency in information to have witnesses with incorrectly spelt names so you can’t even look them up in the directory until you stumble across the one individual that properly writes their name.

As it stands now, I’d hesitantly recommend the original Consulting Detective. But I would never tell anyone to play Jack the Ripper and West End Adventures. And any recommendation comes with ignoring the rules of the game which leaves me wondering why people would play it in the first place.

Truly, the best way to engage with Sherlock Holmes is to simply read the stories.

Sherlock Fails to Catch Jack the Ripper – Game Review

Box cover for the boardgame: Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective – Jack the Ripper & West End Adventures. Image from the internet.

Jack the Ripper may be part of the collective consciousness, but I really didn’t know anything about the case until this week.

Earlier this year I was introduced to a boardgame called Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective. It was less board and more oral story with an interesting concept and a terribly frustrating execution. The short version: you play as members of Holmes’ Baker Street Irregulars. By tracking down leads you are challenged to solve the case in as few steps as possible in order to beat the amazing Sherlock Holmes. Unfortunately, Sherlock cheats. He uses information you the player don’t have access to, magically traces only the correct – generally obscure or illogical – leads and makes up answers at the end. Anyway, with my family, we played all 10 cases, grew frustrated with the system and moved onto other things.

That is until my brother brought home the expansion/sequel. Now, I know he is going to do a much better (and more detailed analysis) of the game when we finish this next series of 10 cases. But in the meantime here is my feelings of the matter. We are, to date, only four cases in to the expansion and have just concluded the Ripper Series.

First, I would like to say that I like the general concept of the series. I like the idea of tracking down clues and solving mysteries. We have even decided to dismiss the scoring system of the game which encourages players to visit as few locations as possible and ultimately miss out on much of the story. Instead, this time around we are not counting our leads, but chasing up whatever clues catch our fancy – while trying to accumulate enough knowledge to answer the random assortment of questions at the end.

The first four cases of the expansion are all tied to Jack the Ripper. Obviously you cannot identify Jack until the end of Case Four. However, you are still given a series of questions to answer related to the earlier cases. I liked the idea of creating a great arch with smaller steps. I even liked the new mechanics which allowed you to get more information from different locations/witnesses by adding clue numbers together (under specific conditions). This meant you could learn more about a character you had already been introduced to.

What failed was the writing ultimately.

A spread of the board and game sheets for Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective – Jack the Ripper & West End Adventures. Image from the internet.

I learned that the case of Jack the Ripper actually did consist of a confusing mass of information and misinformation. The police did a terrible job and the coroner actually included wrong information in his report. An unknown and highly debated number of women are actually attributed to Jack. The newspapers actually fabricated letters apparently from the serial killer. So, this does explain some of the conflicting testimonies you are presented in the game.

Unfortunately, the writers, chose one of the weakest culprits to be Jack. Even Watson points out some of the numerous flaws to Sherlock’s weak explanation at the end of the fourth case. It was so utterly unsatisfying. Thus, I cannot say I am terribly excited to proceed with the other cases, though how they can be worse is difficult to imagine.

Yet, all was not lost. By playing this game, I did learn more about Jack the Ripper. And more interestingly, I discovered that my brother’s first novel was inspired by the case. No, it does not follow any one of the theories. But I can now see the influences of this bloody and violent case on the writing of Thyre. Something I found far more interesting that Sherlock’s impossible solution.

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Be Home Before Dark

I’ve actually beaten Night in the Woods over a month ago. I just happened to get busy with other things to never return and give a proper little write-up about it. Also, I never finished a second play through of the the game. Which gives me a perfect little in for a summary of my feelings towards it:

I don’t know how I feel about Night in the Woods.

Accessed from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/60/Night_in_the_Woods_Soundtrack_Art.jpg/250px-Night_in_the_Woods_Soundtrack_Art.jpg

Night in the Woods is developed by Infinite Fall. All associated images and what not are belong to them.

At first, I hated the thing. I was pretty certain after about an hour that I was just going to have fuel for a lengthy diatribe about how crap the game is. I often feel my rants are my best pieces, so that disgust was fuel to keep going. But a funny thing happened the more I played. I… actually started to like Night in the Woods. Then, just as I was preparing a more praiseworthy post (and one likely a bit more dull) a strange thing occurred. I began to hate it again.

So I am the perfect definition of ambivalence.

But teasing out my impressions and organizing them into a coherent whole is what has kept me from writing about the game until now. Thus, I apologize if this review is all over the place. Much like the game, I never really settled on something. Unlike the game, I’m not going to shove in random guitar hero gameplay or strange little mini-games to break up the main experience.

But first, what is Night in the Woods?

What I expected from Night in the Woods was this: a touching little indie story about a college dropout returning home and trying to find her place in a crumbling, backwater town in a life that has moved on from her glory high school days she’s never managed to let go. And, in a sense, that’s what Night in the Woods is about at all.

It is kind of funny, however, as I think the personal story is where Night in the Woods really shines. It’s not really a story that gets covered a lot. I can’t think of college dropouts being a large trope by any means. And there’s adeptness in relaying the sort of troubled life that lead Mae Borowski returning home with little explanation other than a cryptic “things didn’t work out” offered to her mom. Her attempts to reignite relationships from her past are met with middling results. Gregg is trying to save enough so he and his boyfriend can escape the dying town as fast as possible. Bea has given up on life’s aspirations to run her family hardware store though Mae’s carefree squandering of all the things Bea never had are a clearly driven wedge between the two.

And needless to say, Mae is a mess in general.

This gets me into my initial dislike of the game. I don’t like Mae. I think you’re supposed to like Mae. She is, after all, the protagonist of the story and everything is filtered through her eyes. She is, however, a failure and this is made explicit from the moment you begin. Now if she were just a loser, I could probably handle it. But she’s… so damn quirky. It’s annoying. I hate quippy and quirky writing. It feels like a shortcut from having to develop any depth of character. Mae spends most of her time holding pointless conversations about… I can’t even remember anymore because most quirky writing is focused so much on talking about something off the wall that there’s never any meat to the discussion. It’s vapid writing, meant to amuse and satiate for the moment but holds so little value that it’s gone the instant it finishes.

It’s the written equivalent of potato chips with the added bonus of consuming too much leaves you nauseous.

So, I didn’t care for Mae. I didn’t care for her pointless rebellions. I didn’t care for her personal mortification over her prom night with Ted or Ben or whoever. I really didn’t care about her nebulous reasons for giving up on her future.

Had she died in the end, I would have crowed this apathy as being a masterstroke of writing. That she did not suggests I was meant to have a greater personal connection to the self described anarchist than she ever truly earned.

But while I’m torn on Mae’s character herself, I felt the relationships she had were the strongest points of the game. I was coming around to Night in the Woods—not because Mae ever develops into anything more than the weird loser you politely put up with at a party because a mutual friend foists her on you to have a few moments for herself but because the people she interacts with have far better stories than she. I think it was the moment when you go to Jenny’s Field with your mom that I was sold on praising the game. The individuals that put up with Mae are saints in their patience but also far more profound individuals than your avatar into the world. Mae’s mom is clearly trying her best to give her daughter everything that she never had while also frustrated with the fact that Mae is a problem child to the core. But her love for her weird little offspring is so well communicated, and so naturally too, that it’s hard not to like her. Likewise, Bea and Angus are excellent foils for Mae’s absurdity with their calmer and more grounded outlook. There’s a lovely little moment with Angus when you’re watching the stars and listening to how he was abused as a child that is done with such honesty. Or when Bea is discussing her dead mother that really brings into stark contrast the events which shaped these characters wholly absent from Mae.

There’s a bit of irony in that the more muted and understated characters have better excuse to be wacky misanthropists than Mae. The game is designed to be played through multiple times so I haven’t fully uncovered all the little stories but it’s certainly the supporting cast that does the heavy lifting in the character department. Instead of fully developing the relationship with Bea I spent more of my time with Gregg – the wacky enabler and co-conspirator to Mae’s juvenile delinquency. It was… annoying. With touches of sentimentality when the two would have brief but stark realizations that they’re not still thirteen and acting like irresponsible shitheels isn’t the way to continue on in life.

Gregg does have the briefest character arc in that sense, especially when he realizes that Mae is a bad influence on him and it’s more important for him and Angus to get out of Possum Springs than it is that he and Mae smash flourescent lightbulbs behind his work when he’s supposed to be manning the cash register. So my low tolerance for Night in the Woods quirk is compounded by the fact that I accidentally focused on the quirkiest route through the plot.

In my defence, however, Gregg was presented as Mae’s best friend.

Accessed from https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CvsiFhHWIAAqtCS.jpgAt any rate, while the game is starting to take off with its character developments, it’s also laying the groundwork for it’s final disappointing note.

Well, that’s not true, that groundwork is there from the beginning, you just don’t notice it immediately because it is pretty subtle until your second play through.

I guess this is my spoiler warning.

Surprise! Night in the Woods is a Lovecraft story!

There’s a direct parallel to be drawn between Night in the Woods and True Detective. You can read how much I detest True Detective in the archives here but suffice to say that I wasn’t a fan of character drama with a side of super undercooked cosmic horror. In that regard, I would say Night in the Woods is more successful in interweaving its cosmic horror into its identity. There is the whole underlying theme of Mae’s country hometown slowly rotting away. All the little stories from townsfolk and the history it has gone through all lead to this inevitable and unavoidable rot that will suck in anyone that comes near it. And, of course, there’s the weird visions Mae has at night. They start as innocuous seeming dreams that eventually end with a conversation with some silhouette of a massive cat.

But since everyone is a furry in the game, I’m assuming the shape of the cat is meant to be meaningless.

Thus, it isn’t really surprising when you run into the midnight cult in the bottom of the abandoned mine. You’ve been subtly primed to expect some sort of supernatural or nefarious aspect to the whole “ghost” event that Mae spends the latter half of the game obsessed over. So I wasn’t surprised to discover a nondescript secret society of country townsfolk kidnapping people to sacrifice to their Black Goat in order to maintain order and prosperity to their dying towns. I had predicted that after a couple of days and the conversations about Mae’s missing friend Casey.

I was disappointed with how disappointing that mystery is, however. The supernatural abilities of the cult leader are mostly there to explain such pressing questions like “how could he jump over a fence.” And you mostly stumble into the cult rather than truly digging into unearthing their existence and motivation. It’s there, especially in the old newspaper clippings, but it all feels like an aside more than anything else.

So clearly the focus is meant to be on Mae if it’s not the plot. But Mae doesn’t actually grow from this experience. When the gang confront the cult at the bottom of the mine, at Mae’s “lowest point” in the story, Mae herself is just a little woozy from being shot and disoriented from the Black Goat singing at her. There’s a build up that is entirely wasted at the reveal. And the gang’s resolution to the conflict is to literally kick the cult leader down a hole when he refuses to let them leave then drop some dynamite in the old well hoping that resolves the problem. It feels… rushed and under cooked. Like they needed a conclusion to the story though the story was pretty meandering and skimp in the first place.

I’m really disappointed that the solution wasn’t to willingly sacrifice Mae to the Black Goat in the hopes that it would end the cycle (possibly fuelled by the fact I simply wanted to pitch Mae down the pit – but at least it would make her life have value). As it stands, there’s no earned catharsis here. The cult even let the kids going knowing that the truth would sound too outlandish to really threaten their plans. So to have the confrontation with the cult leader shortly after as they’re trying to exit is even more forced. Thus the game even robs the alternative promise of horror that the youths, despite knowing the truth, are powerless to stop the evil cult because they don’t know their identities and no one would believe them.

There’s a happy ending but it’s as hollow as Mae’s character.

My final point of complaint is that I’m not even sure if Mae’s character flaw – ostensibly uncontrollable rage – is in part fuelled by the Lovecraftian horror or not. I’m normally a big fan of ambiguity but there wasn’t really anything to suggest that was the case and it was more a sense I got from trying to pull some meaning from all the cosmic horror elements than anything else. Perhaps if that were the case then there remained the argument that Mae’s insanity was assured just as strongly as Possum Spring’s decay but Mae even admits she feels so much better after dropping tons of dynamite and potentially murdering three fifths of the town the night before.

Accessed from http://core0.staticworld.net/images/article/2017/03/20170223011453_1-100713269-orig.jpgAnd that no one seems to notice a large chunk of the adult population missing the next day is pretty bizarre.

Thus, I’d say Night in the Woods is a peculiar beast. It’s one of those few experiences with both a weak beginning and a weak end but a strong middle. Generally speaking you want the opposite: to start and end with a bang. Most video games, at the very least, manage a strong start and middle and flop on the end.

Night in the Woods will make you question your purchase, let you fall in love with the game then make you regret the whole experience at the very end. Much like Mae’s drinking party in the woods that one night.

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Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Cheater

Apparently, within the board game spheres, there exists “birth year games.” These are the board games with the distinction of winning the highly coveted and supremely prestigious honours of Spiel des Jahres in Germany. My Game of the Year is apparently this quaint little tabletop game-gamebook hybrid known as Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective. Consulting Detective places its participants in the roles of Sherlock Holmes’ infamous Baker Street Irregulars – street urchins and ragamuffins who sometimes lend their assistance to Holmes in solving his world famous cases. The set-up for the game is simple. There’s a map of London, a London Directory, a collection of relevant (or typically irrelevant) newspapers and the case file. From there, players will be introduced to the particulars of the case through a visit by Holmes’ client and be let loose into the streets of London to figure out the various twists and turns to the caper.

And I’ve just finished it. And if you’re ready to play Consulting Detective, you already know my feelings about it.

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To be fair to Consulting Detective, some of its issues may arise from being an English translation of a French game.

There is a lot of potential in the game. Its entry is really low, making way for people with little experience or little interest in board games able to pick it up and play immediately. Given its flavour and game play, I was able to coerce my family into playing with me. As such, we spent many an hour (and far more than we would like to admit) attempting to sleuth out the secrets of the various cases intriguing and mundane provided in the box.

It’s got an interesting flow where not all relevant clues are obtained by poking around in critical locations or interrogating specific individuals. Oftentimes the newspapers will have little hints or vital revelations tucked amongst their advertisements for new dentures and craiglist-like missed connections. And there are many times that a person of interest will crop up in the case and you must consult the directory to locate their current residence or place of employment.

There’s a lot of fun to be had, pulling these disparate elements together to form a working theory. And there are little revelatory moments where things just fall into place and the grand scheme is formed before you. And flipping through the case book definitely has one of those Choose Your Own Adventures feel to them.

It’s such a shame that these elements are wasted on Consulting Detective.

For, truly, I’m ambivalent to the game. Parts of it I love and kept me coming back case after case. Other parts had me swearing with frustration and anger – typically when reading how Holmes had solved the case and how stupid or ludicrous the solution turned out to be. More often than not, we had reached a consensus to the mystery and, upon revealing what actually occurred, left us scratching our heads because the official solution made less sense than ours.

Part of this problem is that there is a very severe writing issue with the game. When the crux of play hinges on the written word, it’s incredibly disheartening to see so many errors within the texts. And this is just consistency errors – which are the most troubling – but include normal spelling and grammar issues too.

I had not realized how popular carnage rides were in Victorian London. Likely performed by Langdale Pike’s tanks. Nor was I aware of the kilting epidemic occurring monthly in the city. These blunders are humours most of the time but I’m left trying to recall a single case where someone reading the passage didn’t have to stop and try to parse what was actually being said.

And while I will concede that English is a difficult language, this problem predictably bleeds into the game itself. There are numerous cases where Holmes’ solution directly contradicts eyewitness testimony. Most of this doesn’t impact how you reach the conclusion of the case – assuming, of course, that you investigate along the same lines that Holmes does. If, however, you just take the eyewitness testimony as fact and don’t pursue that avenue any further, than it is quite probable you’ll come to a wholly erroneous solution based on those contradictions.

This isn’t even touching that Holmes’ explanations at the end will most certainly contain errors. In one case, Holmes was off by a few years in the age of important characters and the year events took place. In another case, Holmes detailed finding evidence and clues in a wholly different location than where they actually were found – and these locations you couldn’t even visit in the book itself!

Its hard, then, to not feel cheated nearly every time the game comes to a conclusion. This is made even more pronounced given that almost every case requires you to end up in a specific location to learn a vital clue and getting there often requires a true leap of logic or simply guessing correctly on which ally to visit that usually offers nothing but dead ends when you consult them in other scenarios.

This leads me to my primary issue with Consulting Detective. Its greatest gaming component – trying to beat Holmes in the cases by solving the mystery in less leads than he takes – is the most frustrating and unsatisfying element in the whole experience. To play the game in this manner, worried about how you’ll score in the end, is to encourage people to not engage with the game itself.

You see, the scoring is simple. After you’ve poked around the locations and denizens of London, you decide whether or not you’re willing to call the mystery to an end. You can then flip to the back where a list of questions are presented to you. They are sorted into two parts. The first part contains the primary questions concerning the case: typically who was the kill or culprit, why did they perform their crime and sometimes how. There’s a varying amount of questions in this part, from four to twelve, and they will always add up to one hundred points.

Sherlock, being the cheating bastard that he is, will always score a perfect one hundred on this portion. You will also be told how many leads Holmes followed. To determine your point score on the case, you tally up your correct answers, deduct Holmes’ lead total from yours, remove free leads from your total then add five points for each step you beat Holmes or deduct five points for each step you took over Holmes.

Needless to say, you’ll almost always be deducting points. Of the ten cases, my family and I were able to tie Holmes once and beat Holmes once. And this was largely on the backs of answering the second set of questions – which are all bonus questions unrelated to the primary case – by simple deduction and not investigating any of them.

However, we almost always “solved” the mystery well before Holmes had. Usually after two or so leads we had an idea of who did the crime, why they did the crime or how but were always missing one of those details. Unfortunately, finding that one missing step would take upwards of ten different leads to find the information as we scoured through the list of allies for anyone with the potential for tangentially knowing something of use and exhausting every random lead we could follow.

This is the primary problem with Consulting Detective. The manner in which you play is in direct odds with the manner in which you are scored. As a detective, it’s important to follow leads and clues to confirm theories and corroborate alibis. But Consulting Detective directly punishes you for doing so. In fact, you’re better off doing the exact thing which the fictional Sherlock Holmes loathes: make assumptions. If you have any desire to beat Holmes at the game, you need to create a theory from as few bits of information as possible, since each step you take in the game is a deduction from your total score. It’s better to just assume a character’s motives or connection from a single sentence than to ask their colleagues for confirmation or details.

In fact, Holmes himself makes a ton of assumptions in his solutions. So much so that you’ll often be scoffing at how he arrives at his conclusions. Its as if the writers, in an attempt to amaze the player like Sir Conan Doyle did his readers that they forget the players are supposed to be solving the case alongside Holmes. And there is more than one situation where Holmes comes out with information you have no idea how he obtained even after following his outlined footsteps.

Even more egregious, this system encourages players to avoid reading the case book. You are rewarded for not playing, essentially. Which is baffling design to say the least. The “optimal” way to play Consulting Detective is to go to a location and then sit and argue about the details of that location for an hour so you are certain your next step is the most likely to reveal more information.

This gets back to the idea of making theories first and collecting evidence second. You need to determine what you’re most likely to learn by visiting a person before you even visit them so that you don’t waste a step. The problem, of course, is that too many cases hinge on visiting characters that have no right knowing the information they have or following leads with zero indication they would have any relevant clues.

The best example of this, and my least favourite case because of it, is Case Nine: The Solicitous Solicitor. Forewarning, here cometh spoilers.

Accessed from http://www.godisageek.com/wp-content/uploads/Sherlock-Holmes-Consulting-Detective-Screenshot-02.jpg

Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective is printed by and probably belongs to Ystari Games

Case Nine is the prime example of significant knowledge being doled out to random locations. It is the second last case if you’re doing them in order (and the game heavily encourages you to do them in order) so by this time you’ve got a tenuous grasp on how cases normally unfold. We had, before even cracking open the case locations, knew that the victim was having an affair with a Miss Monroe due to a personal ad in the paper. We had thus determined that visiting Monroe would be a waste of time since it would simply reveal what we already know: she and the victim were in love and why a number of other women were feeling spurned by the debonair corpse.

Unfortunately for us, for some really poorly justified reasons, Ms. Monroe happened to be the proud owner of the victim’s pocketbook which was the sole source of information for why he had been slain. We erroneously assumed it was due to his current work and some form of insider trading because we simply could not afford to follow up and confirm the glaringly obvious to be rewarded with information that Ms. Monroe herself didn’t even understand. She literally just hands you the book at the end of her passage while saying, “Here, you’ll need this.”

Case Nine is rife with moments like that but this issue is persistent throughout Consulting Detective. Often times we can’t find the culprit because we don’t know what rather irrelevant social engagement the victim maintained in his final days would have some unrelated waiter or salty sailor who just so happened to notice the passing connection between the victim and perpetrator.

Even worse, there are a number of small subplots working in the background of each case that, if you’re playing to “win,” you’ll miss because you are punished for following clearly unrelated tangents. One case had a whole fascinating mini-murder mystery going on in the background concerning smuggling and international shipping lines that I only learned about because Kait would read the whole case file after we’d concluded it.

So, outside of correcting the problematic writing in the first place, the biggest issue in Consulting Detective is its scoring in the first place. It’s a poorly thought out and implement mechanic that pushes players from playing and enjoying the work the designers put into creating the game.

Personally, I think a better scoring system that doesn’t punish people for enjoying the adventure would go a long way in shoring up Consulting Detective’s weaknesses. As it stands, once you’ve followed six or so leads and have failed to solve the mystery, you know you’re not going to win. And then the case just becomes an embittered and disconnected affair of throwing caution to the wind and knocking on every door to see if you ever stumble across the answer.

For me, what I would do is split scoring into two sections. In the first would be a long list of questions. Of these, Holmes would answer only the most pertinent to the case. The rest would be essentially “bonus points.” Thus, Holmes would, say, accumulate eighty points for uncovering the identity, motive and means of the guilty party but miss out on points of what happened to a missing earring or the name of one of the search dogs. Then, there would be a scale for awarding points depending on how many leads one followed. Holmes would always score highly on solving the case in very few leads to round out his score to one hundred.

In this manner, players can always tie Holmes simply by reading and visiting every single location in the story. There is no penalty for enjoying the case and discovering all its various twists and turns. But there is also the knowledge that you’ll never beat Holmes and, really, you’d rank down at Inspector Lestrade’s level for going well over the number of leads that Holmes does.

You win, but you win knowing that you could try beating Holmes if you wanted follow the strategy that we employed originally. This makes for two approaches for engaging with the product and also insulates from the feelings of being cheated since, if you don’t happen to immediately divine the relevance of a visiting French theatre troupe, you won’t lose the case. In fact, if the questions and lead scale are designed properly enough, the optimal method for beating Holmes score would be taking just a few extra steps than him to uncover several additional answers to the mystery.

In this way, you’re encouraged to play more – not less.

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A New Horror

Cosmic horror has seen a resurgence of late. Lovecraft, thanks to the aid of the public domain, has seen a thoroughly widespread infection of the public consciousness. Bits of his horror show up in television shows like True Detective, stories and comics from people like Junji Ito, music from Metallica, DeadMau5 and Iced Earth.

But, perhaps the most famous spread of Lovecraftian lore is in the boardgame sphere. Fantasy Flight has been pretty prolific in offering a line of products focusing on Arkham and all the horrors from which it spawns. These range from card games, dice games to sprawling board expedition games. I’ve written before of my enjoyment of Elder Signs. Thus, I was interested to hear that Fantasy Flight was releasing a new living card game. I’ve also written about their Netrunner product and not only was this new game going to follow a similar release structure but it was also going to be cooperative.

My biggest stumbling block with Netrunner was there’s no middle ground. Either the people I play are very interested in it and I’m wholly outmatched due to my shallow deckbuilding options or I can’t find anyone willing to put in the time and effort to learn the labyrinthine system. But if there wasn’t a competitive element that gave someone with a greater experience lead a significant advantage in the game then I figured it might be quite good for our table.

Thus, I eagerly played the first scenario of the Arkham Horror: The Card Game (referred to as simply Arkham LCG after this).

Image accessed from http://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/filer_public/23/76/23765ffd-e321-4130-b166-fceb78b2cc4a/ahc01_preview1.png

Arkham Horror: The Card Game and all associated image belong to Fantasy Flight Games

And today I’m going to give you my first impression.

It was… ok?

I enjoyed it. The game was certainly entertaining and took a card game in a direction I’ve never seen. There’s a deckbuilding portion which, I had mistakenly assumed, meant it would somewhat similar to Netrunner. You see, you select an identity in a similar manner: in Arkham you pick an investigator and they belong to one of five classes. Each investigator has a specific power and they have deckbuilding restrictions. For instance, I chose Agnes Baker: a waitress at the local diner who was once a deadly witch in a past life. Agnes, for whatever reason, is haunted by the power she formally wielded and is capable of utilising that power to cast some classic lovecraftian spells. As part of her deck building, I could choose cards from both her class (the Mystic) and the Survivor class as well as neutral cards. Other investigators likewise had access to one other class for their deck construction.

Each class has its own speciality too. The Survivor class, from half my deck construction, appears to focus on skill checks and turning failures into successes and successes into ever better results. My fellow investigator was Roland Banks, a Guardian/Seeker cross that specialized in fighting monsters and investigating locations.

It’s an interesting system but I’m not sure how I feel about the deckbuilding portion. Granted, we had access only to the core box which meant that our decks were built for us since there cards that come in the box only allow you to make two legal decks. But decks are apparently thirty cards maximum and in the course of a game you won’t ever really go through them. So there will certainly be a need for redundancy like Netrunner, however you’re fighting against a clock since doom accumulates every round and once it reaches a threshold you’re forced along that scenarios acts.

I’m not sure how I can talk about the scenario itself since it seems highly specific with little variability. What you do during a scenario is move your investigator from location to location attempting to collect the prerequisite number of clues needed to proceed. You have three actions per turn to play items, fight monsters and perform your investigation checks. You must find the necessary clues before the doom accumulates and ends your game. So even though you can spend an action to draw a card – much like Netrunner – you’re disincentivized to do so otherwise you’ll run out of time to finish the scenario.

Now, the locations and the events that happen in them are pretty specific to your mission. I won’t spoil much, but we started the game in our study and the door to our room mysteriously vanished. That’s the sort of opening that won’t really have much recurrence in other stories. So while it sort of followed the loose outline of a standard haunted house, the details themselves were closer to like a round of Imperial Assault.

And this is where I run into my major gripe with Arkham LCG. There is very little variation within the story itself. The act progresses with the same requirements each time. The locations you visit have the same effects each time you go to them. The doom counts up the same track with the same penalties. There really isn’t much reason to replay a scenario, even if it’s only to try out a new class. You’ll have much better idea of what you’ll be facing and will no doubt have to up the difficulty of the game solely to keep interest.

Course, the way the game improves difficulty is neat. Instead of rolling dice, whenever you perform a check you must draw from a bag of chits. These chits will modify your skill number compared to the check’s difficulty – determined by the level of “shroud” in the room you are performing the check. Nearly all the chits in the bag are negatives (one’s even an auto-fail) but the degree that these chits reduce your skill can be adjusted at the start of the game. We played on normal so most of our chits were negative 1 or 0 adjustment to our skill check. You can change it so there are far more negative 2 or 3 chits floating around the reduce your odds of success. But I’m not certain how effective this balances your foreknowledge of the tasks you’ll face and your ability to adjust your deck and fine-tune it for the challenges you know are behind each door.

Even worse, I loathe Arkham’s pricing scheme. I praised Netrunner for not being nearly as gouging to the customer as Magic: The Gathering. However, despite being the LCG format, I feel like Arkham is far worse than Netrunner. You see, because you are playing campaigns and following a story, you can’t really skip releases. The core set launched with a story with three missions in it. But the next releases are set to follow this order:

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Arkham LCG does provide new and updated art for familiar characters and monsters from the Lovecraft universe and I absolutely adore them for it.

A deluxe expansion the provides the first two missions of a new story arc followed by six booster packs each containing the next story in the sequence. Most of the cards contained in these releases are thus the cards necessary to run that story (the act and mission cards, monsters, locations and rewards specific for that arc). It is impossible to buy the deluxe expansion and simply pick and choose which story boosters you want from its release as they all tie into one another. And it’s not like these releases are cheap either.

The deluxe box sells for around $25. Each booster is $15. For a single post core campaign, you’re looking at $115 for a complete experience. While this is on par with Netrunner, I was never going to purchase each card released since they weren’t necessary to play. Sure, it put me at a disadvantage but it didn’t lock me out of the game. And, for the most part, I could replay with one or two deluxe expansions and just the core quite happily with multiple different deckbuilds that would provide wholly different experiences.

Arkham LCG simply does not work that way. As I mentioned, the core doesn’t change even if I pick two vastly different investigators. The Dunwich Legacy will be the same. And to my knowledge, there isn’t really anything you can do to spice things up. The game requires a set series of events that are triggered by predictable conditions.

Ultimately, it’s the kind of game I simply can’t justify buying. It’s fun and I’ll gladly play with someone but when I look for a game I’m looking for something that I can really get my money’s value. I loathe legacy style games and I won’t ever buy a game that can only be experienced once before losing all value.

Now, I know other people are not held back by these stipulations. And, perhaps for them Arkham LCG would be a far more interesting investment. At any rate, I’m eager to finish off the core campaign and see where things go but I simply don’t see myself stopping by the counter to get my own set to force Kait through at the dinner table.

Which is a shame because I was really hoping to get her into the Lovecraftian universe.

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Brighter Basements

Alas, this will be my last video game review for 2016. Not because I feel like five weeks is a long time to be doing reviews (because I’d keep going if I could). But simply because I’ve run out of new games I played in 2016. Alas, as you get older, you end up with less and less time. But that’s ok. I’m sure I can find something else to review from 2016 until I get to April and then go silent as I go back to novel writing.

Darkest Dungeon and all associated media and gruesome art is the sole property of the twisted psyche and corrupted imaginings of the disturbed folks of Red Hook Studios.

Not to say that there weren’t other games worthy of discussion that released. Sadly, I won’t be hitting up Pillars of Eternity since I’m nowhere near finished with it. Plus, I’ve started Age of Decadence which I’m surely going to discuss on a future date.

But we came for a review and a review I shall deliver. Thus, I present to you my opinions of Darkest Dungeon!

Unlike the other games I’ve reviewed that I haven’t finished, Darkest Dungeon is different than the rest. For one, I’ve tried twice now to get through it. However, it’s greatest negatives keep holding me back from finally completing the game. However, following that first point I know I will finish it because in the end I like the game despite it’s horrible stumbling.

But let’s start with the positives.

Darkest Dungeon drips atmosphere. It’s a dungeon crawling game that set out to blend Lovecraftian horror with Dungeons and Dragons tropes. Visually and audibly it hits those notes perfectly. I adore the the heavy inked visual style the game adopts. Even more, I love their direction for a early gunpowder era and their reimagining staples of class based party gameplay. The healer of the game is the Vestal who is some type of angry battle nun. Other support classes include the Middle Eastern Occultist who directly channels Lovecraft’s fantastical orientalist who is steeped in otherworldly knowledge and spiritualism. Then we have the plague doctor to address poisons and maladies.

Each class is delightfully flavoured and visually striking with distinctive abilities that make coming up with party combinations an interesting mix of careful planning and delightful discovery. Unfortunately, while they do have a large range of abilities, I find that certain builds seem far more useful than others so you will specialize most of your classes in a similar manner. This was a recurrent problem in Xcom so it’s more an unfortunate expectation than a large disappointment.

The expert visual design isn’t reserved just for the classes, however. Both the town and the dungeons are perfectly captured. You get a real sense of progression as you turn your rotting hamlet into a veritable fortress through investments of your family heirlooms into its well-being. And reclaiming those goods from the four themed dungeons is very engrossing. Each dungeon not only places an emphasis on different game elements but are also themed with different types of horror motifs. You have the catacombs filled with undead monsters immune to bleeding but vulnerable to holy powers and just outright damage. The warrens, however, are body horror caverns choked with cannibalistic pigs with large health pools and ready to spread disease at every corner but can be overcome with stuns and bleeding. The weald has been taken over by coven of hags and their mushroom monsters that poison but are susceptible to bleed. And finally the cove is crawling with Lovecraftian pelagic terrors that melt beneath acid.

The developers clearly adore the game and have provided a number of interesting updates since its release. One of them added town events to make your return from dungeon delving even more interesting – and potentially perilous.

As you explore these locales, you will have to overcome ambushes and consider how to interact with curios while attempting to complete a random assignment within its halls. I love the curio system that forces you to prepare your expeditions and guess which equipment will overcome potential traps to reveal even greater treasures then you’d normally discover. It adds yet another concern when your readying a mission than just selecting the best men and women for the job: you need to make sure they’ve got the best tools for the areas too.

There is a certain amount of repetition to the game, however. I happened to really enjoy the base exploration and combat mechanics which was fortunate for me because you do a lot of it. Your immediate goal is to train your adventurers to level six while upgrading their equipment in order to prepare them for taking on the horrors that await beneath your family estate. Since the game adopts a number of Xcom elements and roguelike properties, you’ll invariably be setback while you’re training your troops. There are different bosses available in each dungeon to hone your skills and test your fortitude. And for the most part these bosses are really fun.

But this bleeds into the biggest problem of the game. There is no getting around that after awhile the whole system feels like a grind. Part of it is due to the imbalanced difficulty. Low level missions are stacked in your favour while high level missions very clearly put you at a disadvantage. I’m normally ok with this sort of challenge but each setback doesn’t push you towards a failed game state – it just eats up time. You can’t technically lose Darkest Dungeon since every week you receive new adventurers to toss against the grinder of the different locations. However, each adventurer that dies represents a loss of time more than anything else. Adventurers are easily replaceable, it just takes forever to do so.

And the further you progress in the game, the easier it is to lose your investments.

At the time of this writing, there is an update in the works to reduce the time and grind investment of the game. As I am already locked into the original format, this has no bearing on my criticism though, once again, great on Red Hook for addressing the game’s shortcomings.

Contrast this with Xcom where the initial months of the game are the hardest as you’re stuck with substandard gear and inexperienced rookies. You don’t have the skills or armour to really push through opposition and some bad turns can make it so you can’t keep up with the alien progression. However, if you manage to make it through four months, you’ll have progressed past the alien’s technical prowess and find that you’re just rolling over even the scariest enemies. The more time you invest in a soldier in Xcom, the less likely you are to lose them.

It’s a tough tightrope to balance and it’s unfortunate that neither Darkest Dungeon nor Xcom really found that sweet spot.

So everytime you lose a hero it’s demoralizing only because you know just how much time it’s going to take to build another character up. And it’s not like those first couple of levels are hard either, as mentioned. Furthermore, there’s little in the ways of variety to make repeated levelling of new adventurers interesting. Each dungeon has three assorted bosses that you can kill for improved rewards and to unlock the next level of missions in that dungeon. Unfortunately, those bosses return again and again only with improved damage and health. I was excited at first to see the variation between the bosses and how dramatically the can change the scope of battle. But by the third encounter, you knew exactly that you needed to fight them and it was, once again, more a chore to slay them than any feeling of achievement.

Combat in Darkest Dungeon is turn based with your forces aligned in ranked rows against the enemy. Attacks target specific locations which makes eliminating key targets as well as shuffling formations out of position the key to victory.

But perhaps the worst offence for Darkest Dungeon was it’s titular final level. It was clear that these final levels were design to be the most nerve wracking for the player as you’re warned even retreating from those missions will incur an automatic random hero death as a party member falls in the retreat. What you don’t know until you’ve succeeded on a mission is that every member of that expedition refuses to take on another Darkest Dungeon foray. Thus, assuming that you don’t lose any heroes whatsoever in the course of the game, you need at minimum sixteen heroes at max level and equipment to beat the game. And this is ignoring the inevitable setbacks that the system is designed to incur. Even worse in particular with the Darkest Dungeon is that you really need to have a party tailored to the particular challenges of that level if you want to succeed – something you won’t know until you embark. Which then means you’ll lose at least one hero automatically when you invariably have to retreat. That’s more heroes that require training and equipment. And this is ignoring that certain heroes are far better in the missions than others so some of the heroes you’re levelling end up not being that useful in the end after all.

Which means you’re back to grinding up low level adventurers to deal with the final mission. And then, of course, the real nail in the coffin is that adventurers refuse to do missions below their difficulty level so you need to keep enough adventurers at each difficulty step to train up the recruits you’ll need in the end.

It’s a long, grindy chore. And it’s really bad. I can see what the designers were attempting and I applaud their commitment to the challenge but I can’t help and feel like there must be a better way to implement those ideas. Personally, I would have liked to see the Darkest Dungeon restrictions scaled back. Either have automatic death on retreat or have party members refuse further expeditions – not both. That would ease a bit of the unnecessary grind in the end – which will be well over seventy hours if you wanted to go and kill all the different permutations of the different bosses before taking on the final missions.

As it stands now, there’s really no point in playing Darkest Dungeon without loading up an online guide or walkthrough to cut significantly down on the time you have to take to make up for mistakes. And that’s why I prefer Xcom’s execution over Darkest Dungeon. With Xcom, failure is less frustrating since your options for bouncing back are better. Or, in the worst case scenario, you can simply restart the entire Xcom campaign and still finish a second try without coming anywhere near Darkest Dungeon’s runtime. Darkest Dungeon straight up punishes you for experimenting and learning and it drains the enjoyment from the game.

Each class has specific barks within game which extends to when their will gets tested if they experience too much stress. Darkest Dungeon requires that you manage both your heroes physical and mental health if you wish for them to survive.

Which is a pity because otherwise it hits the rest of its notes pitch perfectly. The story is… well… adequate enough for what it’s trying to accomplish. I think it’s telling that I felt the four base dungeons were more engaging and interesting than the Darkest Dungeon itself which oddly enough seems less horrific despite its attempts to try and up the scale of cosmic horror. But it quickly becomes more over the top than anything else. That and coupled with the aforementioned frustration sucks what fun horror you could extract regardless.

But I know I’ll finish the game and for one reason alone:

The narration.

My goodness is the narrator in Darkest Dungeon amazing. Between the moody dialogue and the expert delivering, I could listen to the Darkest Dungeon soundbytes all day. And with such lines as “Prestigious size alone is of no intrinsic value unless inordinate ex-sanguination is to be considered a virtue” how can you not love it? The tale of the Ancestor’s fall isn’t one that has an inherent draw but the voice actor’s performance make you want to hear every single twisted turn in it over and over again.

Major kudos to the actor and writer for easily the best audio in a game all year. Which is good, because you’ll be hearing him warn about trapped halls and corridors for many, many hours as you retread your steps in the unending gruel that is…

The Darkest Dungeon.

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Please Excuse My Oversight

Well no review of video games in 2016 would be complete without touching on Overwatch. Like them or hate them, Blizzard seem adept in grooming a loyal purchasing base that will buy into every release so that it recoups development costs and then some. Overwatch – by nearly all metrics – is a success. It makes money hand over fist. It won numerous game industry accolades. It sports an enormous player base. It is, presumably, the shot in the arm for the company that has been mired in some bad press of whatever the hell is going on with World of Warcraft nowadays. Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2, while financially great, were critically floundering.

Overwatch and all associated images and media belong to Blizzard Entertainment and its associated artists and whatnot. But hey, at least they’ve finally expanded beyond their three rip-off IP into a sorta, maybe original but still somewhat rip-off IP!

Course, you could argue that Hearthstone was the financial and critical shot in the arm but I don’t follow Hearthstone at all. I mean, I tried it since Jeremy threw a beta invite to me. And I played it enough with its free pack until I came up against opponents which I simply could no longer beat without investing money in the game. It’s a digital collectable card game which mostly means whoever has the most disposable cash to pump into it will likely be the winner. There’s a reason I don’t play Magic (which you can dig through the archives to read) and that reason holds for why I don’t play Hearthstone.

Now, if you’ve been following the blog, Overwatch not getting my Game of the Year will come as no surprise. I’ve gone into great details about its shortcomings. But it’s been half a year and I’ve “beaten” it insofar as one can beat and endless online team-based shooter. So after half a year, where do we stand on the game?

Well, honestly, it’s still fun. And it’s still frustrating. The underlying issues are ever present. My misanthropy makes the game more of a slog when playing alone. There’s still the issue where a very small select of heroes are essentially required if you want to win matches (and often you’re hoping the enemy team is also full of selfish players that don’t want to be forced into the necessary heroes). We still have the issue of being held hostage to Blizzard’s random map choices (also rather important since as of this writing there’s a large bug that makes one hero nearly impossible to play on KOTH maps). And, of course, the window dressing of the game is still largely embarrassing. Though, I suppose Blizzard has officially made their mascot a lesbian so there’s that feather for their cap.

Blizzard as a company is pretty unapologetically evil Social Justice Warriors. They’ve done a very good job of providing lots of varied presentation in their character design and level locations lending the game a very smart, global appeal.

On the flip side, I’m still playing the game. So that’s a boon to Blizzard. It’s not the best game in its genre but it’s good enough. And more to Blizzard’s credit, they’ve been very good about supporting the game post launch. Overwatch has received two new heroes and two new maps not to mention celebrating four holiday events. The Overwatch development team stated they wanted to have “something” new released for the game every month and they’ve been pretty consistent in delivering on that goal.

Even better, the team has gone back to some original heroes and reworked their numbers and their kits. The most prominent of these changes was to a hero named Symmetra. She is basically the left over bits from Team Fortress’ Engineer character after Blizzard finished designing Torbjorn. Unfortunately for Symmetra, she was simply not good on release. I played her a bit (more than was certainly healthy) and could have written a very lengthy post covering in detail her failings. In large part, I think she was designed around her ultimate ability: the Engineer’s teleporter. Unfortunately, the way that Blizzard has implemented the teleporter has made it near universally a bum choice. So, in their rework, they gave Symmetra a choice of ultimates. She can either lay down the limited use teleporter or place a shield generator that is both more powerful than the weak personal shields she initially provided in terms of amount of health it covers and is useful in far more situations than the first point defence on hybrid maps where Symmetra had carved a very narrow niche.

And, outside of a few quality of life improvements, Symmetra was given a new ability. She can project a barrier with one thousand health that her team can hide behind. This has been a simple but fantastic ability and quite unexpected. Prior to Symmetra’s rework, Blizzard had shown no interest in actually overhauling abilities. Their usual tweaks were generally number adjustments in an attempt to push a hero into viability through sheer mathematics alone. Projected barrier not only showed that Blizzard was quite willing to simply throw out a bad idea but it ended up being a quite strong ability in its own right. Granted, projected shield is mostly great because Symmetra’s gun is a terror for the time being, but I’ve enjoyed frying witless enemies for weeks now and I hope that this continues on to the future.

The new heroes have been interesting as well. It shows an evolution in terms of Blizzard’s design capabilities. And while Sombra and Ana both come with ability kits packed with tons of utility, they’ve both also been really enjoyable to play. The earliest hero designs were a bit one note and bland so having these more unique characters in the game makes me eager to see what they’ll be trying next. And they’ve already announced that a third new hero is in the works with speculation swirling around it being a new tank. If they release a tank hero that is as enjoyable as Sombra, I’ll be over the moon (largely because no one in pubs wants to play tanks for some baffling reason).

The holiday events have been fun too. I mean, they’re mostly awful. I think only the Halloween Mann versus Machine-esque mode was worth playing. I know I only played the Mei’s Snowball Nightmare until I got my free chest and never loaded it again. But for those seeking a bit of gameplay variety it can be nice. And they released an update to allow separate queues for the Arcade modes which is some rules variations to the standard format of Overwatch’s games.

Credit where it’s due, Overwatch is a very visually appealing game. I would say their environmental artists really knock the level presentation out of the park even as the actual design leaves so much to be desired.

And, of course, there are the hats. Everyone wants the newest hats and some people are willing to drop way too much money on buying them. I won’t. I bought the game and absolutely refuse to spend an additional dime on it. Especially since it’s steep initial cost still hasn’t been quite met even with these additional content updates. But thankfully Blizzard has an in-game currency which can be used to buy whatever you like. And play long enough and most of your loot boxes from leveling will just be dupes that give you a slow trickle of Blizzard coins to save for these events.

Overall, Overwatch is ok. It’s fun but marred by some rather horrible design decisions. However, Blizzard is committed to supporting the scarred baby and for that I’m appreciative. I’ll probably still load it up all through 2017 since its short rounds is the perfect antidote to the scarce hours of evening play available to me. Whether I continue to play into 2018 is questionable. But there are worse things one could do in their spare time.

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Starry Eyed but Not Star Struck

Continuing our exploration of 2016, there’s another game I wish to discuss. Unlike Xcom 2, however, this title is a little more difficult. At least with Xcom 2 I could gush incoherently for two thousand words, recommend people pick it up then go back to making custom soldiers in the hopes of one day having a pool so large I wouldn’t require any randomly generated fools to show up in my fight against the aliens.

But while this one has aliens, murder, customization and a strong core design which it is attempting to refine, I can’t quite hold it to the same esteem. This game wasn’t going to win my Game of the Year accolade. In fact, I’d be surprised if it won anyone’s Game of the Year title. It’s a troubled little game, filled with good ideas and intentions but hampered by poor execution and mismanaged resources.

Starbound and all associated images belong to Chucklefish Games.

It’s made all the more pointed by the fact that the game was the in-house development for the company that published Stardew Valley. I am, of course, talking about Starbound – the Terraria (but not Terraria) science fiction game of exploration, resource gathering, dwelling building and boss killing by a Terraria designer (but not the Terraria designer).

I think it’s noteworthy that Stardew Valley is my Game of the Year and this is not. They share a number of similarities: 2D pixel graphics, retro game style, quirky aesthetic and casual gameplay. Unfortunately for Starbound, the game never really comes together like Stardew Valley does. And, alas, this is going to be a recurring theme throughout my review: not that Starbound isn’t as good as Stardew Valley but that Starbound is constantly compared to other games and routinely comes up short.

It’s impossible to discuss Starbound without mentioning Terraria. Least of which is because the lead designer Tiy honed his teeth on Terraria. However, I’ve played that game and actually loved it despite my hesitations. It was multiplayer so Derek dragged me into its murderous depths. Which was likely the only way I would pick up Terraria because it is not a pretty game by any measure. Its visuals are functional which is about the greatest compliment one can offer Terraria. So if there is one thing Starbound does better than its competitors, is that it really hits that visual charm.

However, Terraria really sucks you in through a very clever and well executed game mechanic loop. You’re initially thrown into a flat plain world with little direction save that you can go left, right or (as you soon discover) down. There’s a fun element of exploration as you are trying to figure out how to survive in Terraria’s strange little world that’s procedural generated so no two games are ever exactly the same. Once you figure out how to dig you begin to discover ores and with them recipes for crafting better tools, workstations and armour to protect yourself against the denizens of the world. As your base camp grows, so too does your ability to survive further afield. You’re soon learning that there are different biomes filled with their own hazards, monsters and rewards. In time, the player will discover certain boss monsters that will, invariably, murder them on first encounter. But then you learn the tactics to fight them, are elated at the great rewards you get for their murder and then start hunting for the next boss. In the meanwhile, you’re constantly looking to improve and expand your home with all the goodies and decorations you find and learn throughout your adventure.

It’s a fantastic loop where exploration leads to new challenge which requires the next tier of item improvements and advancement to overcome which rewards items that unlock the next step in exploration and the next challenge. Progress is clearly noted through the specific improvement in equipment and territory explored. You never once feel set back because even on death you know that you’re facing a more difficult adversary.

And it still includes the block building that made Minecraft popular. However, the building is but a single component of a greater cohesive whole. You want to build up your base because then you can attract different villagers who will provide you with new services or resources you wouldn’t have otherwise. And random events help to keep the players on their toes without resting too much on their success and shaking up predictability.

It’s very successful. It gives you the satisfaction of progression combined with the eagerness to see what’s next to come.

And it’s this simple feedback loop that Starbound entirely flubs.

I think part of the problem with Starbound was its early announcement and lengthy development in Early Access. Coupled with a poor initial design structure it languished in a troubled four year development cycle that doesn’t show that much time in its final product.

I understand why Starbound staggers in his department. It didn’t want to be a Terraria clone but wanted to fly on its own merits. Sadly, its very introduction is going to make any Terraria veteran leery about that premise. Outside of a stock opening that does the bare minimum to introduce the player to the world and mechanics, Starbound mostly thrusts you into a procedural generated world where you can only explore left, right or down. You must collect enough ores in order to craft armour and weapons that allow you to beat the first boss that then gives you access to new biomes with new ores that you use to improve your items in order to fight harder bosses that open up new areas to explore.

It’s Terraria but its done a whole lot worse. For one, while Terraria gives the illusion of freedom, you are pretty assured to progress down a very similar route as other players simply due to the structure of the game and the availability of certain resources. Starbound attempted to eschew this directed progression and expand further on a small element of Terraria: exploration. Once you’ve repaired your ship, the universe is yours to command. Unfortunately, true freedom in movement would ruin any sense of progression so areas are “scaled” and “locked” behind certain item requirements. Specific planet types are classified based on an unspecified “threat level” that gives an indication of how deadly its surface is. This accounts for the monster level and the environment effects. And while Starbound really wanted to give the illusion of a vast and special universe, it somehow manages to come across as more bland and generic than Terraria despite having way more locales to explore.

Part of this is through the poorly implemented procedural generation. Monsters are randomly generated for a number of planets but they mostly recycle the same small collection of body parts. It’s a cute idea that – in theory – would create a staggering amount of variation. In practice, you’ll see a lot of very familiar creatures that are the exact same as two star systems over, they might just have an eyeball on their tail instead. Furthermore, there are a number of pre-generated monsters that possess more complex behaviour and attack patterns (in an attempt to reach a more complex combat mechanic that’s closer to Terraria). However, there’s no real restriction on these pre-made monster spawn locations. Visit one garden planet and you’ll have essentially visited them all – not to mention have seen probably half or more of what a jungle, bog or Eden planet has to offer. The variety between planets isn’t as important as the variety between planet types so you’re basically better off exploring one of each than visiting multiple of a similar kind. This drastically reduces the sense of wonder and exploration of the universe as you’re mostly scouring through a small niche of different stars now, looking specifically for the one or two planet types you haven’t seen yet then setting down at any place that sounds interesting. And this isn’t even touching the random dungeons and points of interest which are equally recycled. I’ve lost count of the number of underground greenhouses I’ve discovered growing plastic plants and nothing of interest.

So, instead of needing a vast universe of cookie cutter planets, you could have simply had a single solar system with the six or so different planet types present in a row that you could hop across. In this way, you’d certainly feel a greater sense of progress as you moved from the interior of the system to the exterior (or vice versa). As Starbound is now, you don’t really feel any sense of progress. You’re simply coasting from one system to another, searching for different planet types and passing over all the ones you’ve already seen hours before. You might stumble across a planet that’s well out of your league early on then, depending on the direction you take, you might end up in a whole cluster of low level star systems. There’s nothing engaging about the slow crawl through the universe map and – least of all – any sense of accomplishment for pushing its boundaries out further and further.

I feel like the developers realized at some point that they were creating too much of a sandbox without enough direction to focus the game within it. To combat this, there is the Ark. This operates as a central hub, accessed through your ship’s teleporter or any ancient gateway you find on starter planets. This location is the same for every game, filled with the necessary merchants to see certain game elements can function. Unfortunately, there isn’t anywhere near the engagement with the Ark as there is with your home in Terraria. You don’t really accumulate important NPCs at the Ark like you do in Terraria. There are characters you pick up as the game progresses but they aren’t vital as the ones who already start there and mostly offer tangential tasks barely indistinguishable from those offered by the quest system. Furthermore, the Ark is a “protected” area which means you’re unable to affect the blocks there. This was, of course, designed so players couldn’t accidentally destroy a vital shop or something. It also means that they can’t add on to it either.

This isn’t to mean that the base building component is absent from the game. But it’s so incredibly incidental to the actual game play itself. In Starbound, you can form colonies by purchasing multiple colony deeds at one of the vendors in the Ark. When these are posted in a legal “dwelling” then a tenant will teleport in and take up residence. This individual will offer you rent (often in the form of useless items but every now and then they’ll remember to pay you in actual cash) and different tenants can provide different services. They are even tied into the procedural quest generation system. However, these quests are as simple as you would imagine. Typically, they’ll direct you to the nearest spawned point of interest and require that you either escort a randomly generated NPC back to them or that you trade with a randomly generated merchant for some boring knickknack. Complete enough quests for a tenant and they may offer to join your crew. Likewise, you can come across randomly generated villages and complete quests for those residences to get crew members.

The races of Starbound are cute but beyond the initial charm of a juxtaposition between an animal and human culture, there isn’t really much else going for them. We have Japanese fish, Fascist apes, Generic humans, Cowboy gas people, Carnivorous plants, Aztec birds and Medieval robots. 

And more than anything, this is the strongest sense of progression in the game. The more crew you have join with you, the larger your ship will grow. Unfortunately, to expand your ship you also need to find enough upgrade modules which are simple loot spawned randomly in random dungeons. So even if you don’t want to, you’ll find yourself beaming down to boring planets you’ve already seen to search through dungeons you’ve already explored hoping that crates you’ve already opened will spawn modules you’ve already collected.

It’s a game of repetition and its excitement loses its lustre really quick.

Once again, I feel the developers realized the problem they were facing and thus the Ark provides the final core pillar of game play – a main quest. Terraria doesn’t possess a story of any kind. I mean, there might be lore if you cared but really the only impetus to move forward is the player’s own innate curiosity and desire to see the next step in the game. Starbound, however, introduces the player to the most uninspired and cliched plot a human could possibly devise in 2016 – there is some tentacled eldritch monster thing that’s broken out of prison and is trying to eat the universe and it’s up to you as the sole survivor of a special Earth task force to stop it. If this doesn’t sound familiar then you haven’t played: Mass Effect, Borderlands, Half-life, Halo, Crono Cross, Xcom, Starcraft, Metroid, Spore, Prototype, Day of the Tentacle, Alien Swarm, Doom, Dead Space… I mean just pick up a science fiction story and you’ve got a good chance that the core idea was already covered and done so in a manner far more compelling than Starbound.

Granted, I should a make a full disclosure here: I haven’t actually beaten Starbound yet. Instead, I’ve run into a rather game breaking bug that prevents me from loading my save. Because – more full disclosure – I’m running a massive overhaul mod for the game. Anyway, I’ve sunk around 130 hours into the game so I feel qualified enough to review it despite having not finished the main quest. And, get this, the main quest is about six missions long. That’s how disengaging it is. I’ve spent 130 hours actively avoiding the main quest because of how dry and dull this element was. Which, ironically, should have been the strongest element of the game.

You see, main missions are run in separated instances of the game world. They take place on “protected” maps which mean the player can’t place or remove blocks. It’s entirely based on the game play elements outside of the base building. Unfortunately, despite the variability in options, the combat and movement portions of the game are both incredibly shallow and really poorly done. This is the starkest contrast between Terraria and Starbound. I actually enjoyed fighting bosses in Terraria. I wanted to see what the next challenge was. I wanted to explore the newest biome.

Starbound’s bosses are really easy. Especially if you’ve accidentally crafted more advanced armour than the level of the boss. Which is incredibly easy to do since, in order to unlock the boss, Chucklefish have developed the most boneheaded mission type. Since the levels are removed from the universe, they can only be loaded by a specific panel on your ship once you’ve found the coordinates for the mission. In order to learn the mission’s coordinates, you have to find an unspecified number of alien artefacts related to one of the major races in the Starbound universe.

This translates into scouring random planets hoping for a random but specific village spawn. I happened to run into a lot of Apex and Avian villages at the start of the game so ended up exploring and progressing down the planet difficulties long before I stumbled across the required Floran village that I needed (and wasn’t even on the recommended planet type either) to unlock the second mission. I mean, I understood that certain stars are more likely to spawn certain villages but it’s not a guarantee. And after getting bored on three gentle stars that are all basically the same, I wanted to see something else. I’ve done four main missions now and have breezed through them all (barring the first which is actually properly paced entirely because it preceded the stupid scanning requirements).  Even worse, despite these missions being hand crafted, the levels aren’t even that interesting. I’ve seen random dungeons that are more engaging that these mission levels. And this isn’t even touching the fact that most of the platforming in these levels is almost entirely negated by the tech upgrades you can pick up.

And tech upgrades are available once you’ve randomly looted enough tech chips that spawn in random chests like upgrade modules but far more frequently so you’ll have the best tech well before you’re anywhere close to having a full size ship. So the levels aren’t challenging, the bosses aren’t challenging and the story connecting them together is about as threadbare and banal as one could possibly imagine.

I could go into great detail about how the plot and themes of Starbound could easily be addressed or how they should have put more focus into their story elements instead of having them seemingly slapped on. But then it would feel like I was putting in more effort than Chucklefish on the matter and it’s simply not worth it. Suffice to say, for a game called Starbound, they should have given players motivation to bound towards the stars instead of having a main quest and game play which actively discourages it.

So, this is a lot of bad but what about the good?

As I mentioned prior, Starbound allows modding. I specifically loaded up three mods: one to correct the Avian so they have scaled hands (feathered hands make no damn sense); one to make the death animation of characters a bit more dynamic than just a disco flash of light; and one to actually correct this horrible progression issue in the game.

Specifically I run Frackin Universe which has expanded the content in the game astronomically. I know I wouldn’t have put in nearly as much time if I hadn’t used FU. FU tries to gateway some of the content behind equipment requirements by making higher level planets too dangerous to explore due to environmental effects if you haven’t built the proper protections for them. These protections are crafted from ores found on the prior tier planet so you have a logical focus of working your way through planet types in order to open up more worlds. And you want to progress into the more dangerous worlds because the resources you can find allow you to craft unique items and equipment. Now, the progression isn’t perfect since it’s still working in Starbound’s haphazard universe generation but it does make it more forceful in how you can proceed. Also, the amount of content makes discovery better since you’re apt to run into new things even sixty or seventy hours into playing.

Finally, we’re going to touch on Starbound’s greatest strength and the reason why I believe it has what popularity it has: aesthetic. There’s no denying that the artistic direction of the game is fantastic. It’s easily the best of the pixel 2D graphic games I’ve played. And the work the artists have done is actually awe-inspiring. The amount of different biomes and alien worlds, not to mention how weird some of them truly get, is a joy. You can wander amongst enormous plants or crunch across planets formed of eyeballs. Even better, the backgrounds change depending on the biome and solar system you are in. If there are different planets and stars in the system, you’ll see them rise in the horizon. This extends down into the blocks you can collect and the decorations you can build to place in your houses.

But you can make really pretty buildings. And find some too.

The building portion is, hands down, the most fun you’ll have with the game. You will explore solely to find new recipes and items that you can craft back home. You’ll find planets that you’ll want to establish weird farms or colonies upon. Upgrading and decorating your ship has been easily the most time consuming and most rewarding portion of the game. Here you can see through the accumulation of unique discoveries, expanding spaces and lively crew the fruits of your playing of the game.

The visual charm does all it can to excuse the horrible writing. And I’m not even being unnecessarily critical here. You’ll find grammar errors within the first ten minutes of the game. I can’t be bothered to read the lore snippets for how insipid their little tales are and for the number of mistakes contained within them. However, I’m willing to suspend my disbelief towards gasbag cowboys, cannibalistic space ork plants, medieval robots and Japanese fish people because they’re brought to life by the art department so well. Their villages and decorations bring a unity of design that the writing team absolutely fails to deliver and provides a better canvas for you to re-imagine a world with all its charm and quirk while ignoring the one Chucklefish cobbled together.

And, of course, there’s the music. I absolutely adore the soundtrack in the game. I rarely notice background music but when a favourite tune starts playing, I’m apt to stop exploring just to enjoy the medley. I’ve recently discovered (read: stolen) a music box from an Apex village and have enjoyed flicking through the tunes available on it when I placed it on the bar on my ship. The soundtrack is perhaps the only thing that has assuaged my guilt over pre-ordering the game because otherwise I would have been very angry with myself given the issues with its release and development.

Finally, Chucklefish have shown some much appreciated post launch love. It’s received a couple of content updates. Now, none of these have addressed my main concern. One was a fishing update (and I only recently learned how to fish at that!) and the other added post game content that – at this rate – I may never actually see because I really, really, really hate going through their main quest. But the more content they add, the more they can delay the boredom of repetitive content when slogging through their core game.

In the end, there’s some real talent in the Chucklefish house that’s hamstrung by incredibly awful decisions. The art and music side of Chucklefish is certainly propping up the game design side but, unfortunately, they can only carry them so far. I feel like Starbound was a game whose scope quickly blinded Chucklefish to what’s important to their vision. They seemingly learned no lessons in their predecessor’s success, charging headlong to address shortcomings in Terraria’s design but unaware that they were careening straight into pitfalls that the prior game was designed to circumvent. In the end, Starbound creates a game that is largely not worth playing. But if you dig through the mud far enough, you’ll find diamonds hidden beneath the surface. Its pull is in elements that should have supplemented a far more engaging core instead of accidentally copying engaging elements without even realizing why they were good in the first place. But if you like building, there’s some fun to be had here which is relaxing and bite-sized so you can pick away at your creations a little here and there before discovering just how much time has flown by.