I have mixed feelings about Murder by Numbers being described as Picross meets Phoenix Wright. The Picross part is accurate enough, but while there are definitely some Ace Attorney vibes here the gameplay bears only a passing resemblance.

Like, yes, there are murders, and you look around for clues and talk to people with simple dialog trees and you can show them your clues to get a reaction and sometimes this is necessary to get more information that moves things forward. But that’s common in mystery games. To me, the essence of Phoenix Wright games are the trials and especially the cross-examinations. Hearing witness testimony, finding the lie or error, and presenting the piece of evidence that proves the contradiction - it requires some actual deduction and understanding of the case’s facts, and to me it makes for the most satisfying moments of those games.

I’m enjoying Murder by Numbers, but I’ve now completed two of the game’s four cases and there’s been nothing like that.

I get that Phoenix Wright is the best-known murder mystery game series with an anime or visual novel style. The comparison would be inevitable even if the soundtrack weren’t by Masakazu Sugimori (who also did the music for the first two Phoenix Wright games). But on some level it frustrates me because it seems based on a superficial read on the series which leaves out its best strengths.

Given my music purchasing habits, it’s frustrated me more than a few times that many indie games only make their soundtracks available for purchase as DLC on Steam. This was fine for games that I happened to buy on Steam, but I have had to resort to double-dipping on a game I already had on a different platform. It was worth it, but still silly.

So I’m really glad Steam finally made soundtracks available as standalone purchases a couple of months ago. And today, I finally made use of this ability for a game I’m playing on Switch. Feels good.

Ring Fit Adventure is apparently sold out everywhere, which is bad timing for folks looking for electronically-assisted indoor fitness options during the COVID-19 pandemic. But it’s worth noting that while Ring Fit Adventure requires dedicated peripherals and is thus not available digitally, there are other Switch fitness games that just use the joy-cons and can thus be bought digitally. And in my house we actually prefer one of those - Fitness Boxing - to Ring Fit Adventure.

If you aren’t familiar, Ring Fit provides a workout, but does so as part of an overarching RPG-like game. The story is very simple and has a cartoonish feel, including a companion character named Ring who is the in-game representation of the ring-con controller and is excited, friendly, and talkative - to me, the overall effect feels weirdly kid-targeted for an exercise game.

In at least the first few regions of the game, you progress through an area and have some fights along the way. Going through the area looks like a forward-facing 3D platformer (a la Crash Bandicoot) and you step in place to move your character. Along the way are opportunities to point the ring-con in a direction and squeeze it to release an air burst to break something and get coins or open a door or things like that, or point it down and squeeze to hover across gaps. The battles are turn-based and your attacks are variously categorized exercises like squats and yoga chair-pose lifts and such.

I was left feeling like the target audience for Ring Fit is someone who doesn’t want to or can’t be particularly deliberate about their exercise and is looking for a distracting framework to motivate them through it. The idea seems to be that you just play regularly and get through some levels until you’re tired or whatever, and you’ll definitely burn calories but it’s not a consistent or targeted workout. There’s always plenty of stepping, but the other actions aren’t necessarily balanced, especially if you’re optimizing for combat effectiveness instead of a better exercise, which seems likely for the sort of person who wants to play this game. The idea seems to be that the RPG is appealing and distracting and you’ll get exercise in the course of playing the RPG.

I did not find the RPG appealing, given how kid-targeted it seemed. And for me, it’s more useful to get into a consistent rhythm with my exercise so that I can just get in the zone.

Fitness Boxing is much more suited to this. It’s essentially a rhythm game that gives you instructions on the beat via scrolling icons, similar to Dance Dance Revolution. And while you can pick specific exercises if you like, you can also just have it tell you what to do. For example, I told it my fitness goals were “Strength and Cardio” and that I wanted 15-minute workouts, and then I could just start the “Daily Workout” from the menu and it would give me a 15-minute-ish workout that gets slightly harder each day based on my history and performance. I know how long it’ll take, I won’t be unpredictably changing what I’m doing along the way, I won’t have to stop and think about what attacks to use, and I can just get into the rhythm.

(There’s also Just Dance, but those workouts are not progressive in the same way.)

So, you know. There are other options besides Ring Fit Adventure - ones that can’t sell out. And for many players those other options are better anyway.

Maybe the best vibe that a game’s opening sequence can give off is Saturday-morning cartoon.

This is a post about why I stopped playing Lost Sphear. It contains plot spoilers for the first few hours of the game. They are behind the cut. You have been warned.

I wanted to like Lost Sphear. I considered I Am Setsuna to be underrated, with much of the criticism levied against it unfair, so I had plenty of benefit of the doubt to give Lost Sphear. And at first, I really did enjoy it! Like I Am Setsuna, Lost Sphear has beautiful visuals and music. I immediately found its world comforting, its characters likable, and its storytelling compelling. The initial group of characters, their relationships, and their role in their town are well established and feel real enough to invest in.

But after a few hours, the story started going in strange directions that felt less grounded and less plausible.

Read more...

This is a petty complaint, but I’m gonna whine about it anyway.

I Am Setsuna has an active time battle system very reminiscent of Chrono Trigger. One wrinkle added on top is the momentum system - your characters gradually build up “momentum” over the course of combat and can store up to three full “charges”. When taking an action, a character can expend a stored momentum charge to enhance that action, with the nature of the enhancement depending on the action. This increases the strategic complexity of combat - if you almost have a full charge, you might delay an action slightly in order to finish out the charge and then perform the better version of that action. And depending on the state of the combatants, you might want to spend your momentum charges to hit the enemy harder or save them for improved healing spells. And so on.

That’s great. The problem is how momentum is activated. If a character has any momentum charges, right before they perform their selected action, there’s a quick burst of light around them. If you press the Y button (on Switch; I assume it’s Square on PlayStation) during that burst, they’ll use one of their charges and enhance the action.

That probably sounds fine in isolation, but keep in mind that this is real-time menu-driven combat. The way this sort of system is supposed to work is that you keep an eye on the state of combat and plan ahead, making quick decisions and issuing commands rapidly without burning a lot of time in menus. As implemented, the momentum system breaks that flow, because commanding a character to use momentum becomes a delayed, multi-step process. You might decide to attack with momentum, but you can’t just pick “Attack with momentum” from the menu and move on to the next character. You have to pick “Attack” and then keep an eye on that character so you can react quickly and hit the momentum button when they flash. The flash is very quick so as not to delay battle, and in my experience if I stop watching the character and start thinking about what I want the next one to do, when the flash comes I don’t react quickly enough and don’t get to use the momentum as planned. And it’s unwise to just train yourself to hit the button for every flash, because sometimes it’s very important to save charges.

This is frustrating and incoherent. Turn-based RPG combat is about preparation, strategy, and tactics - not action. It’s one thing to add some action flavor via timed hits like in Mario RPGs - those are fully turn-based and don’t split your attention. But a system like this adds the action in a way that directly interferes with the tactics that you signed up for, and in an uninteresting way - you’ve already made the decision to use momentum, and the execution is just about noticing the flash and hitting the button quickly enough. It’s a failure to ensure that what’s hard about combat is also what’s interesting about it.

It’s also totally unnecessary. The Y button is otherwise unused during combat (which is why it’s safe to use for this purpose even when you have another character’s menu up). Why not just attach it to the actual command? Normally you hit A to issue a command - why not just make it so that hitting Y instead means that same command, but with momentum? This would have no effect on the actual strategic depth of combat and is no harder to learn, but would make issuing the command single-step and immediate, allowing you to immediately move on to the next character and keep the flow going without having to pause and waste time on an uninteresting reflex test.

Ultimately it’s not that big of a deal, and overall I still liked I Am Setsuna just fine. But little touches like this can make surprisingly large impressions. Recently I got around to starting Lost Sphear, the next game by the same team, and was disappointed to discover that while the momentum system has been somewhat refined and improved, you still activate momentum the exact same way. I found myself immediately (and unfairly) assuming that this meant that Lost Sphear had failed to learn the right lessons from its predecessor and wasn’t going to resolve its flaws. I’ve played a few hours now and I don’t think that impression is accurate, but I still wish they’d changed this.

Can we just take a moment to appreciate the fact that Animal Crossing: New Horizons, through NookLink in the Nintendo Switch Online app, will allow you to scan and use QR codes for custom designs - including ones created in New Leaf and Happy Home Designer? Meaning that over seven years of player-created content is still usable?

I like when Nintendo makes its games into platforms and then doesn’t abandon them.

Now that we know that Animal Crossing: New Horizons will support island names of up to ten characters, maybe you’d like some inspiration? Well, Angie’s Town put together a bunch of themed words, and I went ahead and made a generator based on it!

🏝️Animal Crossing Island Name Generator🏝

By the way, I like making little web tools like this. If you’ve got a name generator or some other guide or calculator or something that you wish someone would make an interactive version of, let me know!

I’ve finally gotten around to trying all the free QubicGames titles I picked up in December. Most of them I bounced off pretty quickly as not the kind of gameplay I’m interested in, but one surprised me: Mana Spark.

Mana Spark is a roguelike. I never get into roguelikes, but I figured I should give it a fair shot. I played it until my first death and then put it down.

The next day, I found myself thinking about it again. The combat had felt great and the music, sound, and art were excellent. I played another session, enjoyed the atmosphere and game feel, and thought it was a shame the game was a roguelike and I’d never be able to get into it. After a few more deaths I put the game back down.

About an hour later, I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the game and I picked it right back up and went on to play it obsessively for days.

I’ve thought a lot about why this happened. It actually reminds me of my experience with SteamWorld Dig 2.

Metroidvanias are all about remembering what’s where and how to get back to it, so my terrible sense of direction renders most of them borderline unplayable. But SteamWorld Dig 2 has a fantastic map and generous fast travel. It fully solved my problem with Metroidvanias, allowing me to enjoy what’s good about the genre.

Before, when I’d seen someone talk about how satisfying it was to bring a new tool back to an old area to conquer a previously-encountered obstacle, or to figure out how to skillfully use your tools to sequence-break and get somewhere early, I’d roll my eyes at this bizarre celebration of backtracking and subversion of carefully-designed pacing. But now I finally understood it! That stuff was fun, now that my poor sense of direction was no longer getting in the way. What I disliked was frustration and wasted time finding my way around with sub-par navigational aides - not Metroidvanias themselves, which it turned out I actually liked a lot!

Mana Spark provided a similar entry point into the roguelike genre. What I dislike about roguelikes is their permadeath punishment and their random layouts, and how those factors combine to create exactly the wrong kind of repetitiveness for me. Starting over each run from the beginning means you replay the early content long after it’s ceased to be an interesting challenge, and if you die to a late-game challenge the randomized layouts/upgrade/enemies prevent you from practicing or retrying that challenge even once you get back through the early content again.

Given my reliance on novel challenges, it’s unsurprising that I’d be turned off by roguelikes. When I fail, what I want to do is try again on the specific challenge I failed, to learn how to handle it. The last thing I want to do is be forced to make my way through the early levels that are no longer novel or challenging.

But Mana Spark has combat unlike any other roguelike I’ve played. Its deliberate pace and varied enemies requiring different tactics made for a high skill ceiling and kept even the early areas' combat engaging for me for quite a while - long enough for me to get hooked. With that problem solved, I could finally enjoy the things I’d heard people say they liked about roguelikes - experimenting with different upgrades, finding effective builds, having great runs that take you farther than ever before. And so Mana Spark showed me that it really is that reliance on novelty and learning, not the core structure of roguelikes, that causes my dislike of the genre.

More and more, I find myself thinking that most of the analysis we write about games is really about justifying automatic emotional responses that we’re not even aware of and which vary widely between players.

For a while, I thought Mana Spark might be the first roguelike I’d actually finish. It’s looking unlikely, though, because the novelty problem gets worse the further into a roguelike you get. By now I’m consistently able to get past the second boss and into the third and final area where the game’s strongest enemies appear. It’s taking me a while to learn to fight them effectively, and every time they kill me I have to get through the first two areas and first two boss fights before I can try again. And by now I’ve seen all the upgrades, and there’s basically nothing new going on in those first areas - it feels like a run doesn’t even really start until I get past the second boss, and it takes a while to do that.

If I could spend some in-game resources to restart a floor when I die, without starting completely over - or to skip the gameplay up through the last boss I beat, getting the random upgrades I’d have gotten along the way - I’d probably still be hooked, and would expect to finish the game. As it is, too high a percentage of my time is now spent on non-novel gameplay and I’m losing interest.

It’s a shame that Mana Spark couldn’t permanently solve my problems the way SteamWorld Dig 2 did. But I still had a good time with it for a while and am glad that I can now understand the appeal of its genre.

So there’s this post by Andrew Haining called “Outer Wilds critical analysis” but what I find most interesting about it is a digression that has little to do with Outer Wilds.

Haining discusses what he terms a game’s “core loop” - the direct interactions with the game that take up most of your time - and the “metagame” - the long-term progression and goal framework laid on top of the core loop. I’m not a fan of using the term “metagame” in this way since it’s commonly used with a very different meaning, so I’m going to use the term “progression” instead.

What I found interesting is that he points out that games that want to be enjoyable but carry dark or difficult messages can generally choose between two major approaches. He gives Frostpunk and This War of Mine as examples of games that have engaging and enjoyable core loops but progressions that he terms “subversive” and describes as deliberately unsatisfying. You do fun stuff but you do it in service of an unsatisfying goal. I’d probably add Spec Ops: The Line to this list.

The other approach is that taken by, for example, Pathologic. It inverts the arrangement - the core loop is subversive and unsatisfying, but it’s in service of a more traditionally-satisfying progression. Haining notes that this is a much riskier approach, as the vast majority of players will be turned off by the core loop before they get any satisfying progress. And indeed, my sense is that many more people found Pathologic unpalatable than the other mentioned games.

I just thought that was interesting, and something to keep in mind when trying to make a game with dark themes or messages.