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.

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.