Recent reviews by chewfeather

Are the people who implement game achievements aware of what they have done? Do they care?

Astral Ascent is a richly-featured and well-implemented action roguelite game with clever mechanics packed into every available bit of space. Every basic mechanic has several layers of passive abilities that can affect it, and the large pool of potential passive effects encourages the player to roll with what they receive and figure out new synergies rather than try to shoehorn the same build into every run.

Astral Ascent's available achievements range from challenges which must be completed once, to collect-a-thons which must be accomplished over the course of many attempts. One such achievement, requiring the player to collect some hundred-odd colors with which characters' appearances may be customized, is listed at a 5.8% player completion rate at the time of this writing. Third-party websites estimate Astral Ascent's sales at somewhere north of 200 million; third parties also estimate that out of all Steam games purchased, about one third have never been launched; so we might finally estimate that eight thousand players or so have earned this achievement.

Most action roguelites focus on mechanics and gameplay, with only sparse tidbits of story trickled in between runs. In this regard, Astral Ascent is more interested in being like Hades or Children of Morta than it is interested in being like Enter the Gungeon or Binding of Isaac. The game juggles a cast of four (or five, depending on DLC) playable characters, thirteen adversaries, and some dozen supporting characters... and every one of the playable characters elicits different fully-voiced interactions from both friends and foes according to the character's background and personality, some of them reactive to the player's progress or successes or failures, culminating in a series of endings that briefly explore the post-game trajectories of nearly everyone involved. Personally, I struggled to keep track of all the names and intertwined backstories being referenced in pre-fight conversations and team-up banter, but I appreciated the attempt to tell a nuanced story that dovetailed with the mechanical structure of the genre.

Despite the many layers of strategically-interesting unlockables and escalating difficulty modes, eventually a dedicated player will have done everything meaningful that there is to do; all the bosses, all the individual-challenge achievements, all the weapons and their unlockable extra gimmicks, all the endings; in short, having partaken of all the available story-content and all the available gameplay-variety. At this point, a wise player will put the game down and move on. An unwise player will review the achievement list and take stock of what checkboxes remain unchecked. Unlock all the spells; unlock all the auras; unlock all the colors.

All the colors. A player of reasonable roguelite skill and experience will at this point discover that they have acquired less than half of the colors, with some sixty-plus remaining to find, by the time they have finished all the game's non-collect-a-thon achievements. Colors are acquired as random drops in 'exploration rooms', and their drop rate cannot be obviously manipulated apart from choosing exploration rooms at every opportunity. Even so, a player who selects exploration rooms at every opportunity will sometimes obtain as few as one (1) colors over the course of a forty-minute run through the game (though rarely as many as seven; it seems fair to assume an average of four). This means, in summation, that after having done everything interesting or novel, the player is implicitly invited to continue mindlessly running through the same levels over and over again for an additional fifteen hours if they wish to have the honor of having completed all the achievements listed by the game.

And eight thousand players, it would seem, have seen this endeavor through, amounting to a pessimistic one hundred and twenty thousand aggregate hours of rote platforming-- more than twelve collective years of recreational time spent doing a boring rote task when players could have been pursuing some interesting or thought-provoking other challenge elsewhere instead. Players' actions are their own responsibility, but an achievement designer might still stop to consider the sheer amount of human time that might be diverted to a boring task just by assigning a poorly-considered completion value to a single achievement.

By all conventional roguelite measures, Astral Ascent is a stand-out game. I'm not about to give it a negative review just because I'm one of the eight thousand idiots obsessive enough to waste my time collecting colors just because a shiny 100px icon in the Steam client encouraged me to consider doing so. But this one design decision ensured that a large fraction of my overall playtime was spent doing something completely uninteresting, so it hardly seems inappropriate that a significant fraction of this review reflect it as well.

Nicely designed and interesting enough for its low price point.

There's some rough edges here that I would hold against a developer with more resources. Mostly it's just important information that isn't explained anywhere. Explanation of scoring is very sparse, but understanding scoring is important for several unlocks and achievements. Descriptions of guns and characters often omit essential characteristics; I don't like having to take external notes to remember what does what. Given this cryptic approach to game mechanics, I still don't know whether it's a bug or a feature that dodge-chance often just permanently decreases by 10% when a hit is taken. But this lack of explanation of basic things is my only substantive complaint.

And with that out of the way there's a lot of little things to like. While individual runs are extremely formulaic (the only significant element of randomness is just what powerups you get offered during a run), the game offers numerous small challenges and conditions to satisfy in order to unlock the various traits of weapons and characters; this gives a sense of reward for trying different approaches, and gives a feeling of strategic investment about which things one goes out of one's way to unlock. While a player will quickly develop favorite playstyles and upgrades and synergies, many different strategies and combinations are viable, and achievements and unlock-conditions will frequently encourage the player to experiment with builds and synergies outside their normal approach, which helps to inject variety into what would otherwise be a repetitive experience. There's some satisfaction in coming up with a strategy to clear an unusual challenge like winning without shooting or winning without moving, though these bits of puzzle-solving are pretty bite-size and ultimately don't demand too much deep thought.

Reasonable scope of gameplay for a $5 game. I enjoyed playing it and I'm glad I picked it up.

Pretty good. Nice sprites, generally good performance, good variety of positive and negative choices to make during gameplay. Some class balance issues, some burdens that feel overtuned or undertuned compared to others, but those are tiny quibbles relative to a meritorious whole at a negligible price point. A little irritating when there's still grindy achievements left to do once you've completed all the skill-challenge-based achievements, but that's a small offense. Few noticeable bugs; maybe once or twice a game an invulnerability would fail to happen, but not much beyond that.

Good job.

An artful and different experience, but ultimately not well designed for play by people who don't want to consume spoilers. Eventually you'll have done everything you've figured out how to do, and then you have a vast and slow-to-traverse emptiness with no indication of what could possibly enable you to reach any yet-undiscovered content. Either you consume spoilers, at which point one might as well be consuming passive media rather than interactive media because the element of player determination has been essentially removed, or you spend literal hours of boredom trying to figure out something that you haven't done yet that could possibly have some effect, or you just wait and get an ending that ignores any progress you did make. When a person wants to engage with the game's content but the game does not provide them with a viable means to engage with the content, that is a failure.

The game works fine. It incorporates interesting ideas, requires the player to make sometimes-interesting decisions, and its central time-mechanic gives it a different feel from other games. These things put it on good footing. But ultimately the principles by which it was designed make it indifferent to whether a willing and attentive player gets to engage with it or not; this response to a customer's paid interest deserves negative review.

Not perfect, but much better than I expected. For the price point, the flaws are more than acceptable.

Core gameplay is a competent fusion of familiar concepts; part bullet-hell, part twin-stick space-shooter, part roguelite random drops and meta-progression.

The good:
- The meta-progression system has a novel twist. Players must choose how much difficulty to take on in each run; the more difficulty you take on and succeed, the faster you progress toward higher tiers of upgrades. Play it safer to make incremental progress, or try to claim a great amount of progress in a single highly-handicapped run.
- The system for equipping, modifying, and scrapping different kinds of shots feels novel and works well. One must make thoughtful tradeoffs, consider when it's worth it to reroll randomly-chosen upgrades, and consider what stats should be prioritized both early and late in a run. While slightly awkward to access, the color-coded system for viewing which equipped shots are performing best and worst is a great and somewhat unexpected quality-of-life feature; same goes for the system for viewing how much damage each bullet of a shot-pattern would inflict at each point in its trajectory (!).
- Shots, gamemodes, and bosses all feel creatively devised and competently implemented.
- Apart from eventual performance problems far after the last required level, I didn't encounter any significant bugs or stability issues.

The imperfect:
- Some quality of life features are buried hours deep into the upgrade tree; they should be made available much earlier on. Before unlocking them, to be most effective, during each run one must write down some shot-scrapping information that has been randomized for that run, then cross-reference that written information every time one is selecting a new shot. "To be more effective, do a repetitive and boring bookkeeping task" is not a design decision that makes the game more fun.
- Most stats don't give you any raw numbers to work with: they tell you roughly what they do, but not to what magnitude. When you buy a damage or range upgrade, how much damage or range are you getting? When you reduce enemy armor, how much are you reducing it by, and how much does what quantity of armor actually help anyway? One just doesn't know, and the tiny incremental differences made by each additional invested point are small enough that having to buy them sight unseen feels frustrating. Even just providing a few milestone figures-- rough amount of benefit at 0 points, 10 points, and 20 points, for instance-- would allow one to try to decide how to value these stats.
- Lategame boss spoiler information: The design of the wave 100 boss is fine in and of itself, but is a poor choice as a progression-gate and achievement-gate given the design of the rest of the game. Specifically, the wave 100 boss is the final relevant goal for a number of unlocks and achievements, and its design completely invalidates every aspect of the player's build and skill expression except for passive defensive stats and classic twitchy bullet-avoidance skills. This creates a situation where one spends the whole run speccing for only those relatively-boring things to the exclusion of almost all other stats, unless one is exceptionally talented at that one mechanical skill. The entire rest of the design of the game focuses on cool shots and synergies and xp-accumulation strategies; to culminate in an encounter that ignores all those things completely is dissonant with the game's main source of appeal. Granted, at high upgrade tiers one can easily beat that raw stat-check by prioritizing those stats, but it's still not as fun as a climax that challenges the skills incentivized by and actually practicable in the rest of the game.
- Achievement design is questionable. Achievements like 'get [trophy type] for every game-mode on one character', much less ALL characters, would be an incredibly repetitive grind, not to mention somewhat prohibitive to begin with due to the nature of some of the game modes. In addition, some achievements refer to 'platinum trophies' which the game never describes how to obtain, and one is without description altogether. Generally, achievements are used to signpost interesting/worthwhile things to do or challenges to overcome in a game; many of these feel either too inscrutable or too tedious to take on rather than too legitimately challenging, leaving a sour taste in the mouth of a player who cares about achievements.
- Daily Challenges are cute in theory, but generally one is trying to make progress on gamemodes for the sake of unlocks, and Daily Challenges do not allow one to do that; this means that for the sake of progression, they are essentially wasted time. If they incorporated some random set of gamemodes and counted those clears toward the unlock progress, one would be more inclined to engage with this system.

With all that said, I was highly impressed for a game that was on sale for its discounted price point; those positives easily outweigh those negatives. Some good work.

Various things are done well. Game is perfectly functional; the way the party-based deck works gives the game something to make its mechanics distinct from other turnbased-deckbuilder-combat games; equipment and character gimmicks are reasonably creative. Those last two elements are essential to give a game a reason to exist when there are so many alternatives in the same genre. While the aesthetic is a little homogeneous, many assets are of a fine quality, and occasionally one is surprised by an unexpected quality-of-life feature. The writing does a good job of adhering to the unusual theme; in most ways, things seem well put together.

The problem is that the gameplay is deeply unsatisfying. The card-pool is already full of mostly-trash to begin with, and as you play, an additional unavoidable deluge of mostly-trash gets unlocked into it; regardless of whether it's balanced or not, it feels bad. (Unlocking additional non-optional trash into a character's starting loadout is especially discouraging; having a mix of good and bad unlocks for the card-pool can be a game-balance consideration, but permanently making a character worse once a condition has been met is hard to explain.) In many such deckbuilders it is preferable to decline most cards that are offered, so that by itself isn't a problem, but this game takes it to an extreme; it's rare to see a game with so many cards that one cannot imagine being a useful part of any functional deck at all. There do exist viable strategies/synergies to build off of, but it's especially unpleasant to pick up a strategy-enabling piece for which you don't yet have support when you may well never find anything else compatible with that strategy, and hand-size is small enough and late-game threats are fast enough that a single hand with a couple dead cards in it can be a devastating problem if it happens at the wrong time; under these circumstances you can't afford to gamble on more than a couple of unfinished synergies, which exacerbates the problem with card pool quality.

The game has other lesser problems as well. There's no way to review the overall card-pool or item-pool, so it's harder to even theorycraft about what synergies have more or less support at what card-rarities (nor is there any clarity about exactly how card rarity affects which opportunities to get cards). The descriptions of cards and equipment effects often have poor clarity as well, leading to picking up bad cards or items because their descriptions led to wrong expectations about how they would behave. For example, cards which perform an action based on stacks don't bother to say whether they consume those stacks in order to perform the action; you just have to find out through experience which ones behave which way (Armor Strike does not consume the armor, despite being worded the same way as Rage and Stone effects that do consume all respective stacks, whereas Sun and Moon benefit from all stacks while only consuming one; none of these behaviors are distinguished by anything in the descriptions.) Cards which interact with 'buffs' or 'debuffs' are certain to lead to surprises about what the game considers to be a buff or debuff (e.g. you cannot remove a stun with debuff removal, and whether any given beneficial green-numbered effect on an enemy is considered a 'buff' varies wildly). Effects which inflict an additional hit don't always apply a character's on-hit effects to those additional hits. Some characters or items have effects which their descriptions do not mention at all; e.g. one character has a couple of Stance cards added to the deck every battle, but neither the character's description nor their starting item's description mentions that effect, so even if one would otherwise be inclined to get rid of that starter item, one might hesitate to do so out of fear of losing the unmentioned effect for which it might or might not be responsible. Finally, there's no boss variety, and boss-gimmicks render some strategies unviable, so out of the already-trash-filled card pool, an additional portion of it becomes unacceptable once you know what strategies the unlockable final boss invalidates.

But all of those are things I could complain about in a positive review. The only really disqualifying thing in this game is just how unpleasant it feels to play, spending most of one's time wading through rote battles with a non-synergistic deck of starter junk hoping that the game will let you draft into something useful this time rather than offering you niche cards for situations that simply do not arise, when the only acceptable cards are ones that can serve *some* purpose in a deck that has to be tuned to deal with a boss that can swing for lethal damage on turn 2 depending on how a random determination is made. It's well put together, it has some decent potential, and it's clear that plenty of work went into some parts of the polish, but it's hard to have a good time playing a game where the reward for completing challenges is that your card pool usually becomes permanently worse.

Two main issues.

One is information exposure and clarity. Descriptions of status effects and equipment effects are often ambiguously written or missing important information. Seeing enemies rolling dice is next to meaningless when you don't know which moves the numbers on their dice correspond to, and you're not going to memorize the numbered moveset for every enemy. Enemy passive effects are important enough that if the player knew about them in advance, they might make some strategic choices-- shuffling dice or equipment around, or choosing a different lucky number-- but by the time the player can see the passive effects, it's too late to do any of that, so the opportunity for strategic choice is lost. That would be fine if there were enough strategic choice to be made in other areas, but...

Issue two is the lack of interactivity and couterplay. With very rare exceptions, the player's gameplan and the enemy's gameplan don't really interact with each other: you may tweak your loadout before combat, but once combat starts, your loadout lets you pursue victory in a single inflexible fashion rather than anticipating or responding to individual opponents' tactics. To borrow a CCG term, rather than interacting with each other, you're playing solitaire against each other, and you win or lose based on whether your solitaire game is stronger than theirs. There's lots of status effects, lots of passive effects, and lots of little mechanical interactions between your dice and the situations in which you get to use them, but they generally don't create situations where you're playing differently because of something your opponent did, apart from binary decisions like 'I got hit, I need more shield now' or 'My battery got drained, I need more energy now'.

The poison status effect is a good example of this. Poison is threatening because it ignores your shields, inflicting health-damage directly in a game where damage the player suffers carries over between fights and healing-sources are limited. Having different kinds of threats is good if it makes you think about and play around them differently, but in this case, you generally have no means to influence whether your opponent uses poison, no means to avoid poison when it is used, no means to avoid or mitigate the damage poison inflicts once you have it, no means to actively reduce or remove the poison stacks, etc. It's a part of your opponent's gameplan that, with rare exceptions, you cannot interact with or 'play around' in any way. This no-interaction no-counterplay style pervades the whole game. If an enemy has 3 stacks of dodge, ensuring that your next 3 attacks will miss, you can't wait them out or remove them in some alternate efficient style; whether you do it now or later, you're just going to have to attack through them. If an enemy has a buff that will inflict an ailment next time you attack their shield, likewise you can't outwait or remove it; one way or another you are going to take that ailment because you are going to have to attack. So regardless of which such tactics your opponent uses, the way you approach the fight is unchanged.

This is unfortunate because the rest of the mechanical design seems fairly thoughtful. Equipment and effects are varied; changing your equipped dice makes you think about not just how big the numbers are and how reliable their distribution is but whether there's a good lucky-number distribution between all your primary dice and whether the added effects on the dice are good for the situations in which you expect to be using those dice. The charge mechanics feel novel and are sometimes interesting to play around. So, design wise, they're halfway there, but there needs to be meaningful choices to make inside of combat rather than just outside of it. Of the four or so runs I played, the strongest one involved a loadout that didn't allow me to make any combat choices at all; the character could only attack, every turn, and it did so right through the normal final boss and the one after that. it turns out taking away your ability to make choices isn't a downside when you didn't have meaningful choices to make in the first place.

There's other balance issues, such as how heavily early equipment RNG dictates whether a run is a cakewalk or an impassable slog, but that's a tertiary concern compared to the game lacking a strategic core.

Played through it twice, once for 100% and once to clean up the rest of the achievements.

In terms of audio and visual production value, it's good. Mechanically, it's fine, if somewhat on the easy side. But it starts in an interesting and story-forward way with an intense ambiance and an interesting premise, and then just drops more and more of that story on the floor as the game goes on. By the end of the postgame, the final narrative sequence is mostly about a different game entirely, while leaving every narrative question I was actually interested in completely unanswered.

It probably feels harsh to give a negative review to a game that plays perfectly well just because of its approach to storytelling, but it's hard for me to exaggerate the extent to which that storytelling peaks in the first five minutes and goes continuously downhill from there. At the start of the game, everything about the character's role and their motivation for pursuing the game's objectives make sense in light of in-game events. But by midgame, you're just wading through trite non-sequitur video-game-isms that go unexplained and unacknowledged by all the narrative parts of the setting (e.g. the best non-spoilery example I can think of: every dungeon eventually teleports you back to a remote area of your headquarters where a crowned ghost-bird locked in a box grants you a new spell after an internal battle. It's a very video-game-y mechanic, but why? Who're these birds? Crowns are a meaningful symbol, so why a crown? What's the link to your organization? Were these spells locked and hidden to keep them from people like you; if so, when and by whom? These details would fit perfectly well in the story and add appropriate complication... but instead, nothing and nobody else ever mentions them or expresses any interest in them, so they're just a wild out-of-the-blue mechanic and animation that turns the game farther toward no-context generic-fantasy. If there's going to be no tie-in to the rest of the game at all, it would be better if they were just items in a box without fanfare; having an elaborate visual spectacle with no meaning just makes it clearer that the game doesn't care about the why of things anymore, and neither should you.) Postgame continues right off the deep end; video game logic rises to 100%, narrative justification falls to 0%, and a convoluted fetch-quest culminates in a cutscene that's mostly about a different game entirely (that game was fine; I'm not sure why its protagonist needed to take narrative splash-damage from the 'true ending' of this one).

So ultimately this review is dedicated to the escalating sense of disappointment I felt as each development in this game's story managed to further undercut the initial interest it piqued. Death winking at the camera, this is for you.

Played through it. Got what the game calls 100% completion. Didn't have fun. The end.

In more detail: Everything in the game feels low stakes / impactless; it's sort of surprising they left non-boss combat in it at all, since it doesn't feel elegant, doesn't have much room for skill expression, doesn't have important outcomes, and doesn't feel like it ties into the plot. You platform around environments that are more linear than they look, you occasionally perform a timed movement segment with a woefully squishy-feeling movement system where you're fighting either the camera, questionable geometry, or the controls, and then you keep doing that for several hours. If you fail a segment, you just start back at that segment again. 'Puzzles', if they can be called that, are extraordinarily rudimentary. You can find secret things but none of them really matter. You can do sidequests; they're done not when they come to a meaningful resolution, but when you exhaust whatever amount of arbitrary writing they have.

The game tries to tell an emotionally heavy story revolving around planetary-scale disaster and sacrifice and refusal to accept reality and the ways in which suffering can be inflicted despite good intentions, and then undercuts any ability to take it seriously with plot elements like the cartoonish deaths of background characters (e.g. one group is shown to have died by attempting to lift their crashed spaceship out of a mound of pillows; a member of the crew sneezed due to the tickling of a feather, and they all died by dropping their spaceship on top of themselves.) and non sequitur references to famous poems by one Tarragon Danderpaws. There are stories into which such elements can fit, but here they make it hard to envision the game-world as a place where the main character can be driven by the life-and-death pressures that underlie their characterization.

Maybe this game is a victim of its predecessor's success. Maybe I was foolish for seeing the game's visual callbacks to HLD (e.g. blade-wielding pink-cape-wearing main character with its distinctive color scheme) and assuming this game would have any similarity to HLD, with its tight controls, skill-heavy gameplay, and thoughtfully-designed challenges. But apart from this game's reasonably high production-value with its varying and visually-appealing environments and its technically cool playing around with the directionality of gravity, there was nothing really engaging about the rote and drawn-out gameplay.

$40 for a game with a 10-hour play-time is a relatively high price in this market. This game doesn't deliver the kind of experience that would justify it. It's probably unfair to expect this developer to capture lightning in a bottle twice after selecting such a radically different medium for this game, but that doesn't reduce the feeling of disappointment.

A "deck" is a series of cards, usually but not always randomized before use, and usually but not always unknown until drawn. A "deckbuilding" game involves constrained addition, removal, or modification of cards to form such a deck. A "card" is an individual gameplay object; at minimum it is a two-dimensional informational surface comprising any number of symbolic or textual information fields (such as names or costs or suits or ranks or values or effects), but in practice card-gameplay is distinguished by the way in which cards shift between availability for play and unavailability for play, often depending on the cards' presence in one of various locations or states: in hand, in play, in deck, in discard, or so forth.

In this game, you have a selection of abilities with cooldowns. These abilities *could* be represented by cards, but because you perform no card-like operations with them, there is no reason to conceptualize them as cards, and they are not presented as cards in-game. The abilities you have equipped are all available at any given time, cooldowns notwithstanding; their position has no mechanical significance apart from what buttons you must press to activate them, and there is no concept of different zones for them to be in; the abilities that you have are the abilities that you have, full stop.

All of that is to say-- this is not a deckbuilder, this is not a card battler, and it is unclear how it could be described to be either. These aren't cards, they're just equipped abilities. There are very similar games that ARE deckbuilding card-battlers, such as One Step From Eden, but that is because it has *cards* which which are arranged into a shuffled and sequentially-played *deck* and which are thus at any given time either playable or unplayable based on their location and the game-state, and for which you then perform *deck management* by constrained addition, removal, and modification, both inside battle and outside of it. By contrast, in this game, at any given time, you have a fixed ability-loadout and you fight enemies with that fixed ability loadout. You may modify the ability-set you are using between games, but that's just setting a static loadout, not deckbuilding. The only part that's even slightly deckbuilder-adjacent (and for that matter, the only part that is even slightly roguelike-adjacent) is a mode in which at various times you may replace an equipped ability with some other randomly presented ability; while this is a mechanic similar to mechanics found in deckbuilders, every RPG that features modifiable equipment-or-ability loadouts is obviously not suddenly a deckbuilder based purely on that feature.

So to start off with, this game is woefully miscategorized. That's one problem; there's plenty of others. The campaign-story is poorly written in terms of exposition, overall plot, and individual dialogue lines; trying to experience that story is a tedious exercise waiting for too-slow messages to appear in a series of disjoint and bewildering scenarios, and trying to make use of awkward preassigned ability-sets which can't even be rearranged for mechanical convenience on the first clear of any given scenario. Where other games provide different characters and scenarios, they lean into what can distinguish different playstyles and thematic choices; in this one... It's just a dull mixed-up blob of stuff. Nothing in the singleplayer experience's various modes has yet felt memorable or enjoyable at all.

The combat-gameplay is competent and probably has potential. Eventually you have enough control over your chosen ability-set to build a playstyle and pursue several different strategies in terms of how to control the battlefield and inflict or avoid damage, but the package in which that gameplay exists is so uninteresting that I struggle to labor through its pieces. There are other games in this genre that are more polished, more responsive, more satisfying, and cheaper; given the experience so far, a $30 price point (which thankfully I didn't pay; I don't remember how discounted it was for me to look at it) for a game that feels like this is *shocking*. If the only part you care about is the competitive mechanical Battle Network-inspired combat-gameplay, this might be a game for you, but it fell far short of my expectations on top of not even belonging to the genre it advertises itself in.