Tag Archive: “review”, page 5

Review: Eggcelerate!

Posted in entertainment by Adam

10 March 2022

A difficult and messy racing game.

Eggcelerate! (Steam: Eggcelerate!) is a single-player racing game that’s part of this complete breakfast. Err. It’s a game where you drive a car with bowl on top. In the bowl is a raw egg. You try (and fail!) to keep that egg in the bowl as you speed and swerve across 30 levels. When it inevitably falls, it leaves what looks like a fried egg on the ground. Pretty soon, whole swaths of the road are covered in fried eggs.

A brown vehicle making the second turn on Track 2, with the roadway around the turn covered in fried eggs. — The road gets gnarly with eggs when you try to go fast.

It is a difficult game, and it’s one I can say I did not master. (I’m not sure if I could have mastered it, even if I devoted significant time. I half-wanted to dig up some TAS software (tool-assisted speedrun; what speedrunners use to create the theoretical fastest runs of games) to see if it’s even TASable—whether its physics are repeatable given the same input.)

The early levels are simpler, and more fun for their simplicity. There are various obstacles, hurdles, traps that get introduced as you move to later levels. There are:

humps
timed traps (hammers, boxing gloves, windmills, and saw blades)
fans
ramps
litter (bowling pins, beach balls, flower pots, dog bowls, etc.)

But even simple turns prove a challenge at times.

Each level has two times to beat: par and developer. The par times are mostly reasonable if tricky. The developer times are very tight, and some may require some trickery. For example, your car doesn’t have to cross the finish line. Your egg has to cross the finish line. So for at least one dev-time, your best bet is to bounce the egg over the line.

As you complete levels, you unlock new designs for eggs, bowls, and cars. By default, your setup is randomized for all three types. If you don’t like a combination, restarting (R on keyboard) will randomize it. I tended to play with randomization off, as once you beat all the levels there’s a bowl that’s just floaty little blobs and I didn’t like it. Rather than re-restarting whenever it came up, I switched randomizing off.

It has some rough edges. The controls aren’t configurable in-game, so it’s W,A,S,D with D being reverse and brake. I’d prefer E,S,D,F, but it’s not so bad using the default. You can also use the arrow keys if your keyboard has them.

On some levels, you should wait a beat or two before starting, as the timed traps will smack you if you don’t. This is actually a small disadvantage to getting a good time, as if you hold accelerate (W or ↑ on keyboard, probably right trigger (R2) on a controller) when you restart, your car gets to speed a bit faster off the start line.

Some levels have (brief) camera changes and obstructions. Going through windmills, the camera reorients to fit through with the car. At other places (going under a bridge) you’re left staring at an obstruction until you’re past it. Neither are ideal. The camera changes felt jarring, and trying to drive blind is a bad idea in games as in real life.

The developer recently added a ghost car option, which was modestly helpful at times, but I generally turned it off as I found it both distracting and not helpful once you find a semi-optimal line. I found if I tried to match or beat the ghost, I tended to fail more and get frustrated, versus turning it off.

It’s unclear to me if car selection makes any difference. On some levels I tended to do better with specific cars, but the bowls are placed at the same spot on each car, and they seem to have the same speed and handling. Maybe it was a placebo?

When you’re going for better times, you’ll play a level perhaps hundreds of times. This gets tedious, and one way to break it up is to switch levels. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t currently have a quick-level-select. You have to exit to the main menu and skip a couple of screens to change levels. (The game is in active development for the DLC, so hopefully this is something that will change.)

The game shows you split times, but only flashing them at the bottom when you pass certain points on the levels. It would be nice if the splits were recorded so you could use them as targets to beat. Also would be nice if the ghost cars respawned at each split, so if you’re way behind or ahead of the ghost, you’d still get some benefit at each split.

The timer is a little strange. It shows up to thousandths of a second, but the thousandths place is always just zero. The hundredths place can only be even, despite several of the developer times having an odd value for the hundredths place. It gets odder, as readers with sharp eyes will note from the post image. In one run on track 27 I somehow ended up exactly 0.001 seconds over, which is the only time I’ve seen that place used in the time I played the game. I’m not sure if it was some kind of gag or what it all means.

As a hard game, this is decent enough. Hard games tend to have rough edges, and that’s both part of their charm and part of their difficulty.

I enjoyed Eggcelerate! on its own terms, though it’s not the kind of game I feel most at home in. There are people for whom this sort of game is a really good challenge, but I’m not one of them. For me it was equal parts diversion and frustration.

I played for 35 hours, and I got 61 of the 87 achievements (though the latter number will probably change, as it is poised to have a winter-themed DLC release this month (March 2022)). I beat all the levels, and got the par times on all but the last. I only beat developer times on ten of the 30 levels.

I could have kept going. There were several developer times I got close on, say within half a second. But it became too frustrating: it felt like if I beat them, it wouldn’t really be because I got better at the game. It would be because I got lucky in one run out of hundreds. So I cut my losses and enjoyed most of the time I did spend.

For people who dig these hard games, this is worth a shot. If that’s not you, but you’re okay with not beating every last bit of this game, it’ll probably be a blend of some fun and some frustration like it was for me.

A bit of postscript here, as I think the game could be improved for a more general audience.

The main goal of changes, in my mind, would be to give the game a firmer rooting in skill. As I wrote above, I didn’t feel like I mastered the game, nor that I could have. I doubt there’s a track in the game where I could consistently beat the developer time. That’s a sign that the outcome is less about a skill than it is some sort of luck, at least in my case. If there’s a good way to make the game more skill-based, I think it would go a long way to appealing to the general audience.

I’d like to see how I’d have done with a coarser timer. Round the timer at whole seconds (or maybe halves or tenths). This would result in fairer developer times and fewer instances of players like me getting so-damned-close-but-no-cigar times. (I suspect this is why it’s only using the even hundredths, but don’t know for sure.)

Perhaps a slightly larger bowl. Keep the current one for a challenge mode, but if the bowl were just a little more forgiving, some levels would have been a lot less frustrating.

Other game modes. Lots of options here. I would have loved to try an eggless mode (call it “softboiled” or something punny like that). Or a mode where you get a time penalty for dropping the egg, but it gets respawned and you keep racing.

The developer could experiment with an egg control mode, where you can move the egg (or the bowl), or maybe even just “hop” it a little or something. Like tilt in pinball. Or a “hardboiled” mode where the egg is giant and you have to push it over the goal with the car, Sisyphus-style.

But for the core (yolk?) of the game, something to make it a little easier, a little more repeatable, would be a blessing.

Review of Thimbleweed Park

Posted in entertainment by Adam

4 February 2022

Be sure to check out the arcade, if you can dig up some tokens.

Thimbleweed Park (Wikipedia: “Thimbleweed Park”) is a retro-modern take on the classic graphic adventure game. Made by some of the very people (i.e., Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick) who made Maniac Mansion (among other games), it is set in a run-down town visited by a pair of FBI agents investigating a murder.

Thimbleweed Park definitely shows the experience of the creators and of the art of adventure game design itself. It is a layered story that shifts from the murder to the characters living in and visiting the town. It is a solidly-built game with some head-scratching to puzzle your way through.

The game features two modes of play: hard and casual. I played through on hard first, and I think that’s the way to go. The casual mode is there if you just want to get through the story, but it’s very much a carved-out version of the harder playthrough.

Besides the no-deaths and puzzle dependency methods, each character has a journal or to-do list that helps the player keep track of what’s on the character’s plate at any point in the game. A lot of thought went in to trying to keep gameplay smooth and not let the player feel too stuck or lost, and I can say that I beat the game without getting any hints. That’s a good signal that the game is well made, as my general record for adventure games is that I eventually break down and get at least a few hints before I beat them. (To be fair to me, most of the time I know the solution and only need guidance on some minute detail about where to click or that I needed to do some non-obvious thing first. Like you can’t butter the bread unless you let the butter soften, or you can’t tie your shoes unless you study a knot-tying book first.)

The game was funded via a Kickstarter campaign, and there are some nice in-game contents that reflect those pledges, including the books in the mansion library and the extensive phonebook of Thimbleweed Park. (There are achievements for reading enough books and calling enough answering machines, but even if you don’t go for those it’s worthwhile to spend some time with the backer-contributed content. Some good stuff there. It would have been nice to have an direct interface to browse through them out of game, possibly after beating the game.)

The phone system does play an in-game role as well. The game-related phone numbers (listed in red in the phonebook) are worth jotting down out-of-game, to save the trouble of getting a character to look at the phonebook if you’re focused on a puzzle or goal.

Thimbleweed Park took me about 19 hours to complete, including all achievements. I like adventure games, and I enjoyed this one. Each one has its own quirks and offers a different take on the genre.

Parts of Thimbleweed Park are a comment commenting on the genre and give the player an overview of the process. Ron Gilbert has written a bit about how he sees adventure game development and what he thinks makes a good one (see Grumpy Gamer, Ron Gilbert’s blog), and this game definitely reflects his philosophy of the genre well.

The parts played as a ghost were a high point for me. I think it’s an underrated aspect of games that let you experience foreign perspectives like that. I had a similar feeling in playing Amnesia: Rebirth (where the player-character is a pregnant woman). The character of Ransome the *beeping* Clown was also a fun addition.

If you like adventure games, this one is worth a spin.

Review of ISLANDERS

Posted in entertainment by Adam

18 January 2022

A chill game of filling islands with buildings.

ISLANDERS (Wikipedia: “Islanders (video game)”) is a building placement game that takes place on a series of randomly generated islands. It can be thought of as a board game in which the island is the board and the buildings are the cards you get dealt. Presented with a fresh island, you add a batch of buildings to your hand and from there you place them on the board—on the island.

Each building has a bubble representing its range of influence, and you get points based on what is inside the sphere when you place it. You can also undo the last move (unless you’ve added a new batch of buildings). Each building has a set of others that it wants and doesn’t want near it—call them friends and enemies. Friends add points, enemies subtract.

Different building types take up different amounts of space (and there are some variations of some building types that have their own distinct footprints). Equally important, some buildings are worth more points. These need to be played strategically to max out your score—building up an area you plan to place these in. But the game nudges that as most of their friends want to be near each other anyway.

It’s not too challenging once you play a few islands. You start to figure out roughly where things should go by trial and error. You’re free to hover the ghost building all over the island and try to find the highest score you can get. Advanced strategies mean in some cases you’re better off not going for the best score for a single building, so that you’ll have spaces to place things later and so that you keep future buildings from losing points by being too near to their enemies.

For most of the game, you will want to add new buildings to your hand as soon as they become available. The exception is an achievement for always exhausting your buildings before getting more and scoring 1000 points. Having more buildings available means you can try different placements or hold some for later while adding their friends to the board ahead of time.

Once you have enough points, you have the option to move on to a fresh island. You can keep adding buildings to the current island until you fail to get enough points to get a new batch of buildings. At that point, if you’ve unlocked the next island you can go on to that. Otherwise, you’ve hit the end of the world and your score is your score. Early islands are easier to fill out: you add more buildings to your hand for fewer points, and you can move on to the next island sooner too. The first islands are also give you more space to play.

There weren’t any bugs for me on Linux. There are ways you might be able to shove some buildings where they don’t look like they fit, but nothing too crazy. The biggest annoyance was the yellow point text when placing a building could have poor contrast with the background (especially the sand and some of the levels with yellow grass areas). In those cases you might need to spin the level around so that you get an orientation with enough contrast to read it. (A simple drop-shadow on the text could probably have solved this.)

I enjoyed my time with ISLANDERS. Including achievements, it took me about 30 hours to play through. While I was playing I wondered about the people who would build these cities, the architecture and the world they would live in. A calm and easy enough game, I’d call it contemplative. No quick thinking is needed as you can take all day to make a move (though there are a few achievements for getting through some of the early islands quickly). If you want to try harder to maximize your score in the early rounds, some math will come into play. You’ll try to calculate which order to place things. But as the game progresses, it becomes more about space management and making use of your undo to try things.

There is a sandbox mode where few restrictions are placed on what you build. You can add as many of the various building types as you want there. And from the main menu there is a photo mode where the UI is hidden so you can take pictures of your current island. There isn’t a way to save islands, which is a small heartbreak, but it also adds to the charm of the game that what you build is quickly washed out, like a sandcastle.

The title, Islanders, written using the wall building in sandbox mode. — A simple example of what can be done in the sandbox mode. In high score mode, this would be terrible.

Worth a look if you want to slow down and fill up islands with buildings.