Évaluations récentes de docter

I like card games. I’m just not sure this is it.

Card City Nights is a card-laying game where you strategically place cards on a board to form combos. Each card has a set of arrows, and if two cards have arrows pointing at each other, they’re part of the same combo. Match three cards*, and you get an effect. These effects range from damaging your enemy, disabling one of their cards, healing one of your disabled cards, or giving you extra health. The game is quite simple and easy to understand, but there’s enough depth to have different deck playstyles.

The loop is simple: you battle for packs, buy non-rare cards at the shop, and build your deck, all while progressing through the story. The characters and cards are all (?), as we’ve come to expect, from the Ludosity roster. Ittle Dew, Princess Remedy, and a few familiar faces from Slap City—I admit I’m not super familiar with their other stuff—are all here. Everything is written in this quirky style that I didn’t care for, though it might appeal to hardcore Ludosity fans.

Single-player TCGs need to avoid the obvious pitfalls to be fresh and fun the whole way through: have balanced cards, make many viable deck archetypes, and throw some twists into the mix. Otherwise, you make a deck 2 hours in and stop interacting with the deck building aspect. If your deck is strong enough, you even stop thinking about the card game itself. And then all you have left is going from map to map and accepting the story battles. Card City Nights has some cool cards with nice effects. Rotating, disabling, and removing your opponent’s cards, effectively messing up their arrow configurations, is very satisfying. Cards being balanced around having more arrows (and thus being easier to combo) versus stronger effects is quite interesting… and aggro strategies are so incredibly dominant, nothing else matters. As soon as you realize you only need to stack attack symbols, and SOMETIMES place a healing card, to win everything, the game becomes trivial**.

And so the game falls apart a few hours in, and then it’s over. I understand one of the updates added more disruption-type cards to counter this very strategy—showing that the devs understand this is a problem—but the game itself doesn’t put them to good enough use. No rock-paper-scissors here—only rock.


* Actually, match three symbols, but it doesn’t really matter.
** with one exception: one of the final encounters plays an incredible anti-aggro deck with a few very annoying cards that I would have loved to see a lot more of.

You deserve better.

We’re all here for a few weeks and then we die. Spending our time on video games is a noble hobby, to a degree. But you can’t waste it on Flynn the Crimson Guy.

This is about 10 hours (?) of open-mouthed nothingness. Speaking to someone who’s only half interested in what you have to say. Slop. Scrolling on social media, but worse, because there sometimes you’ll find kinda funny video.

Instead, you walk around a bland platformer, hit-hit-dodge, hit-hit-dodge, guy says some nonsense, exclamation mark appears, move around the map, trivial platforming, hit-hit-dodge. Magic ball attack. Simple puzzling. I couldn’t take it anymore. I stopped a few hours in, implicitly gaining seven more hours to live. Maybe I’ll watch a few youtube videos instead.

This is also kind of a review for Gwen the Hen 64. I recommend you get both of these in the Retro 3D Platformers bundle. TL;DR: These are cheap, well made, quick, and, most of all, fun games that are worth and deserve your time and money.

Both games are 3D platformers with a moveset reminiscent of the Marios, except you go way faster and are easily able to skip large chunks of the levels once you get good. Levels are short n’ sweet—the first playthrough of a GtH level takes maybe a minute, PtP maybe two, and repeated playthroughs going down to around 30 seconds—focusing on one or two main ideas and never overstaying their welcome. The movement and design make you go fast even if you don’t plan on it, and they’re fun and breezy.

The two games have a cute overworld that rewards you with some collectibles—which you use to unlock secret levels, and full completion credits—if you explore them enough. There’s several NPCs with dialogue, but no real standouts. You don’t play these for the writing.

I dig the aesthetics, though. Entities are sprites in the 3D world, but everything’s a lot less gunky and ugly than in Retro Kart Rush, another game by the same dev, which I also liked. Speaking of RKR, picking up the collectibles makes the same snap sound I loved so much in it—good decision! The music here is good, too. Some tracks sound great, but most stay in the background.

You should start with GtH and then play PtP. PtP improves on a few things: the air attack doesn’t give you as much speed, making it clearly distinct in purpose versus the dash. The game also just feels better overall, though most of the movement is very similar. The camera’s better: pressing up on the right stick doesn’t zoom it in anymore, and it doesn’t snap strangely when entering buildings. There are now reasons to pick up the coin items: more collectibles. You can’t farm them now, either. A few of the hazards are easier to parse. Also, you can compete against your level ghosts in PtP—which is unreasonably fun.

So, wishlist time? The coin NPC in each level could’ve had some variation. If you somehow inform the player early on, you could make the price a lot higher or lower in some levels, leading you to other kinds of coin placement. You could also have the NPC be in other places. You could have them in the beginning, and have a level that’s fun to transverse both forwards and backwards (then teleport the player to the end, or change things up on the second run-through), or have them be in a difficult detour somewhere in the middle.
I would have loved to see some other level types, too! Racing or chasing an NPC and Mario Galaxy-style remix levels come to mind. More challenging levels in general would be great. Stuff that makes you really learn the movement intricacies. I’m hoping Sam the Seagull is more ambitious in general. I’d love a longer game with tougher late game stuff.

All in all, I liked GtH and PtP. I liked RKR. We don’t speak of Lab Remnants.
So I guess I’m a KuriGameDev fan.

My sword, my torch, my wits, and my heart. I check my pockets, rummage around, a few coins—cost of entry. Cheap. The steps leading down are damp, but my shoes grip tightly. I take said steps.

A few floors down, I find a lock. Check pockets, no key. I look around. Gnome, always hated them. As I approach, I notice something: moving a single tile towards them causes them to run around me, escaping to the previous floor. I reminisce back to my training in the Paquerette fields. I’ve never been an old school dungeon crawler-crawler, so if it’s been done before, it wasn’t in any of my previous ventures. I go up a floor, outsmart him, grab my key and his scalp. Sometimes, I try to go up a floor, and I’m not allowed. Meaning I always know when going up to the previous floor is required. Meaning sometimes the solution is spoiled, and becomes too obvious.

The key to surviving these dungeons is to know thy enemy. And there are enemies aplenty. Some are aggressive, some take a step back and fight in range, some charge, some dodge. We all move in real time, tile by tile, but my reflexes aren’t what’s being tested; it’s my brain, my puzzle solving.

I step on a pressure plate. Strange. Last floor I noted that they require constant pressure to be considered pressed, but this one doesn’t. Am I misremembering? It doesn’t truly matter—just step on it once to figure it out—but it’s worth writing down.

The dungeon is fun. It’s clever. I enjoy outsmarting my foes. Charming. From time to time, I’m forced to bash my head against a few walls to find loose stones, required to proceed. While these moments are rare, they slightly blemish the beautiful dungeoneering experience.

Sometimes, I’m teleported back to the surface. Changing things up is nice. The experience recontextualizes itself. The dungeon itself is fresh—varied architecture in all its brain teasers.

The dungeon is very short, and is best approached without hints.
Also in the dungeon, a girl searches for her brother, while the town and the dungeon fiends try to stop her. I paid no heed to her. These dungeons aren’t giving you anything super exciting and groundbreaking. But I ventured down and simply enjoyed the fun puzzles for what they were. And I recommend that puzzle lovers among you do the same.

Bertram Fiddle is a point & click game with a good-looking, stylized, cartoony art style that immediately catches the eye. However, it doesn’t do anything special. I didn’t care for it, but you might.
You control two quirky characters in a quirky Victorian London setting, trying to locate a murderer who stole something from you. Bertram kind of bumbles around, making quips at anything he finds, and eventually gets to his goal. The puzzles you solve along the way are shockingly easy, and nothing is more than two or three steps long. The game mercifully locks areas after you’re done with them, too, so you don’t waste your time listening to repeated dialogue.

“Oh, but maybe there are some dialogue options I’d like to try later, to get a few good laughs in while thinking of a puzzle! Even though you mentioned it’s super easy, I’m a beginner P&C gamer looking for a light-hearted joke or two, so I may get stuck figuring out whether I should push, pull, look, or give!”

Bertram Fiddle—I can’t not do this—is no Monkey Island. There are no dialogue options, there are no click actions, and there’s not much more. There is voice acting, which is quite good, though it seems this may limit the amount of dialogue present. The game boils down to moving your cursor until you find a highlighted area, and clicking on it. You’ll either pick it up, use it, hear a funny little line, or have Bertram say, 'It’s mighty heavy, oh heavens, I simply cannot move it.' Which leads me to the other mechanic this one brings to the table: the second character. When Bertram goes ‘I could never push this crate! It’s too heavy!’, you click on your companion and then on the crate. Puzzle solved. I tried having the guy (who isn’t called Fiddle, but always felt like it in my mind) interact with tons of other stuff, but you’re met with a repetitive “Sorry boss, can’t do that” type of response.

And yet… this might still be your thing.

Here’s a litmus test to determine whether you’ll enjoy your (very short) time with Bertram: at some point, you pick up an oar in an alley. Bertram grabs it, looks around, sees a locked gate, and says something, not exactly, but in the style of ‘Hey Fiddle, we’re picking up an oar, in an alley, near a gate. It’s an alley gate oar!’, which later pays off, once getting rid of the oar, with a ‘heh, see you later, alley gate oar!’. The voice acting makes sure to enunciate all of it. If you think that sounds pretty funny, you might forgive the clunky gameplay and unsatisfying ending. Otherwise, just replay Monkey Island. Maybe Bertram shouldn’t have waved that oar around like a feather duster.

Spectacular Sparky is a mediocre snoozefest with admittedly pretty good visuals and sound.
It’s a 2D platformer with linear and repetitive levels that refuse to change things up or be challenging, and it makes for a boring and bland game. At the end of each level, there’s some quirky dialogue, followed by a boss fight that you win by dashing and shooting every time. Every few levels, there’s an autoscroller shmup section that is, again, really easy and uneventful.

It’s not challenging, it’s not fun, and it’s not worth your time.
I guess it could be good for younger people wanting to get into games from the Genesis area, but intimidated by their difficulty? It’s super forgiving in its movement and health system, so it may make sense if you feel that way. Otherwise, skip this one.

Grapple Dog. It’s okay. Can’t recommend it.

It starts well enough. There’s limited, but good, music. The dog is cute. You walk and jump around, learn the ins and outs of the grapple mechanic. You can fire it at a 45-degree angle or straight up—this is fine—grappling lets you gain a bit of speed but you quickly lose it due to slow movement or cramped level design. While the controls aren’t super intuitive, you’ll get over it. The game never really demands you to be precise, anyway. The colors are great. World 2 is fun too. You notice the time trials are a bit too easy, which is expected: there’s not many ways to gain or lose speed. You appreciate how blue things can always be hooked on to. When the game is working, it’s really working. Early levels have a nice flow to them: jump, bounce into hook into bouncepad into another hook, bounce on enemy then hook into a cannon, etc. It’s fun and upbeat. Just maybe a tad too slow.

But the game overstays its welcome. Things quickly become repetitive: moving around is very simple and slow, so there’s not much you can do to change things up besides adding new hazards. But Grapple Dog insists on adding hazards that just slow the pace down even further. Conveyor belts, slow-moving hook spots. Wall climbing. Lots of repetitive wall jumping. You quickly realize you get so much health you might as well ignore any hazard that doesn’t physically stop you from going. And it’s all kind of drab. The game becomes pale, and so does the gameplay. And you’re in like world 4 and there’s still two worlds to go. And the levels are super long and drawn out. And the story, which starts insipid, becomes unbearable. And the music goes from cool Jet Set Radio vibes, with great voice work, to repetitive and annoying. And you missed a gem.

Grappling hooks are fun. When games include a hook, they should also design their movement and levels to complement it. Less swinging and jumping to reach higher platforms, and more dynamic swinging that propels you forward while gaining height, chaining into a sequence of incredible moves. Test my agility, not my patience. Like what you were doing for the first few hours. Like what Remnants of Naezith does throughout its runtime (same length as Grapple Dog) of fun speedrun challenges, and actually challenging and fun medals, in short, but very satisfying, levels. I could never recommend Grapple Dog to someone who hasn’t played Remnants. Grappling hooks are fun.

Marble Computing is a tiny game in which you lay tracks for marbles and solve logic puzzles. Though its aesthetics are somewhat bland, the game hyper-focuses on one aspect: creating engaging computer-related puzzles. A few of these are quite interesting—mixing a 3-bit adder and an XOR gate with the physicality of marbles going around tracks is fun and makes you think about those problems in unique ways. The physicality is really what shines here: you have very limited space, marbles bump into one another if you place tiles haphazardly, and conditionals and synchronization are purposefully cumbersome. Simple elements, like XOR gates, become quite complicated yet manage to avoid being overwhelming. This is aided by the fact that there’s usually a few levels you can tackle in any order, so you’re never really stuck on any sections.

You know a game is good when its negatives seem more like items on a wishlist rather than true drawbacks. All of these are work-aroundable, but also annoying and worth mentioning. This is one of those games that deserves that extra polish. A worse—or longer—game would’ve had me really complaining about this stuff, but not here. Here’s the wishlist:

Features like undo and redo, saving and loading solutions, histograms that track more than just piece count (why not measure speed?) are obvious improvements. Also, being able to see the marbles while under the panels could improve visibility and debugging. There’s a weird timing quirk when they go under, which was always strange to work around. A feature for remembering the best score on solutions after altering them would be helpful; currently, not being able to save can be really annoying and often requires taking screenshots before editing anything. Lastly, the ability to set a default exit for splitters could streamline the puzzle-solving process. As it stands, this seems to force players to construct more convoluted solutions than necessary, slightly detracting from the game's smooth flow.

Again, this game is good, quick, and cheap. It deserves a solid recommendation as something to do in a weekend. If you’re a fan of puzzle games. This is Spacechem-lite. Which is a great thing.

I liked Golf Story. And it’s a shame this is the best we can do on PC. I really wanted to like it, too!

I think RPGs about anything other than fighting are dope. This is an RPG about something other than fighting. This is a great-looking and great-sounding game. A lot of care has been put into the game's appearance, and it paid off. All the relevant story characters have a cool unique design and playstyle that really pops. But the game itself? What a mess.

I couldn’t get through this one. It was just too tiresome. Any second not interacting or dodgeballing with a character (rather than generic NPC) is a second of my life I’ll never get back. Slumped in my chair mashing attack. Most fights, at least up to the middle of chapter 4—where I finally threw in the towel—are trivial and extremely boring. You finish the fight and sit through the results screen. You knock out a guy and the game interrupts the match to yell ‘OUT’ at you. Let me play! Let me fight the guy that only does lob shots! Let me participate in the tournament—isn’t that the whole point!?

And look. The worst, most unforgivable sin this game does is not even how boring it is. It’s not even how you spend most of your time rolling back and forth in the school. It’s something emblematic of how this game thinks: it’s the fact that your teammates aren’t controlled by the AI. Instead, you just move them like a blob, sort of doing all the moves at once. No multiplayer, either. It’s just not fun.

SKULL CHAINZ is a game which has been extensively praised for its unique concept, which is essentially Hammerfight-but-in-hell. But, actually not, because while the trailer shows mouse movement, I whole-heartedly recommend against it. Instead, grab a controller and get rotating those analog sticks! This game is not for the weak-thumbed.
You use your thumb to move your skull around, typically making circular motions so that your skull friend orbits around you. You use any other finger to throw your skull friend, damaging enemies at a range.

The game pulls you in with its sleek 3D model-to-pixel look (which kind of reminded me of Valfaris, and makes you stay with the interesting gimmick. But is the moment to moment stuff worth it?
Probably not. There are a few issues here that hamper the overall experience:

Each level has an interesting gimmick. These range from enemies powering up from eating their friends’ remains to grow stronger, to them having their own skullz, to enemies incubating eggs, which in turn spawn more enemies. BUT… each level takes way too long to finish, and on repeat playthroughs (when going for perfect scores, for instance…) they quickly lose their glamour, and most time is spent rotating in place, waiting for the enemies to spawn.

The powerups are fun! They change and improve your skull in noticeable ways. BUT… you can’t really pick which ones you get, and some levels—Pride and Gluttony, for instance—feel a lot better and more fun once you find a few of the good ones. Also, the auto-aim powerup is totally useless if you're going for perfect runs. This is because you can't throw your skull, which would presumably make things too easy.

The bosses are thematically appropriate and look great! In general, they’re pretty tough! Envy is a stand out! A mirror match which steals your power ups when you start the fight! And pretty challenging while you’re figuring its patterns out. Probably the coolest moment in the whole game. BUT… a lot of the boss fights feel like they were designed to be played with the skull throw—which, again, you can’t use when going for perfect runs. When not throwing, sometimes it feels a bit random whether or not you'll get hit. So you get hit, and you're forced to reset. This involves awkwardly pausing and quitting to the level select— a task that’s inconveniently easier to do with a mouse than a controller. Then you go through the same sluggish, overly easy, and time-consuming level again.

…And you stop liking SKULL CHAINZ.
I can’t say I hated it, though. It’s mercifully short, and still might be worth your time, especially if not going for a full completion. Especially if you really vibe with the music & aesthetic, if the gimmick intrigues you, and you own a controller with comfortable analog sticks.
While this is a negative review, I empathize with the dev(s?) for making an interesting and charming game, as flawed as I may have found it. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter. People say opinions are like skullz: they keep chainging.