Recent reviews by CrateBoxer

I write a lot of reviews with a lot of words a lot of the time. GARAGE: Bad Trip is a pretty cool game, with scary monsters and scarier hitboxes.

But the human centipede boss can go do what human centipedes do best: eat ♥♥♥♥. Unfun garbage boss that seriously ruins it for me.

UGH, FINE, if I had to elaborate, I would say that the enemy design and control scheme seem constantly at odds with one another, especially when an enemy moves faster than you, especially since your dodge roll barely works and has the cool-down of a six pack a day chain-smoker.

That's all I got for this one. It's really neat, really atmospheric, really grindhouse, really frustrating, not really fun.

Carto, the Carcasonne puzzle game you never knew you wanted, is cute. Really, really cute. Toe to tip, everything you find in this game is a real cutie. You guide a girl who speaks in emojis through some strange and lovely islands, hugging bears and petting camels and making friends and enjoying some pretty funny dialogue that fits very nicely into what I call weird Nintendo humour. It's like a relaxing and fluffy blanket game; there's no real antagonism, no real villains, no fail states, just lots of problems to solve with positive thinking.

You'd think map tiles as a puzzle mechanic wouldn't have legs, but Carto manages to squeeze every bit of mileage from the premise without resorting to unnecessary abilities or gimmicks. It also ends pretty perfectly, wrapping up just as the puzzle mechanic can't stretch any further. Finding that right puzzle game balance between brevity and padding is tough, but Carto nails it.

I mean, it's cute! What more can I say? It's a seriously adorable game to play over a couple afternoons. It's happy and warm and just plain nice, definitely a good way to cheer up on a rainy day.

If Tales of Maj'Eyal is the Lord of the Rings of traditional roguelikes, Dungeonmans is probably the Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I have been on an absolute tear running through a ton of different roguelikes lately. Dungeonmans probably isn't my all-time favourite or the one I spent the most time on, but my adventures in running a school of ultra-manliness certainly makes it one of the most memorable.

Normally excessive reference humour kills a little piece of my soul, but Dungeonmans' sense of humour really works for me. Yes, there are lots of silly dumb references, but a lot of the comedy of Dungeonmans comes from a more universal absurdity—kind of like how Discworld balances straight satirical parody with more situational comedy. You play as Fightermens and Southern Gentlemens and Psychomensers and fight enemies like the dreaded Trigar—which is three tigers standing on top of each other and had me absolutely rolling. Skills are also in on the joke—armor is divided into light, medium and Real. There's a motley crew that runs your school, like the librarian who hates his job and warns your uncivilized Dungeonmans not to eat the books (with good reason—one trait prevents you from reading scrolls because they look so delicious you can't stop yourself from eating them).

Another thing helping Dungeonmans is that it's both a parody of its genre but also a pretty good entry on its own (think Shawn of the Dead or Princess Bride and the like). Combat is very skill heavy a la ToME, but with shallower trees that reward spreading out and trying new combos. There's some really creative ones too—one skill tree involves Ire, a resource that drains in real time and throws a fun wrench into my casual roguelike tea-times. The school also provides a roguelite layer that boosts stats, tracks IDed stuff and offers random bonus skills. I know some people will sneer at the thought of anything carrying over in a traditional roguelike, but it's not exactly like the school makes the endgame easier. I tend to think of roguelikes as a lot of going through the motions broken up with nail-biting decisions and the leg up from the school just lets you skim through the stuff you've already cleared and get back to the high level play faster.

Unfortunately Dungeonmans can be a little buggy, but I have to compliment the developer for adding QOL, fixing bugs and developing fun new features even seven years on. It doesn't have the greatest UI—extra hotbars block other elements, for example, which can be quite annoying in a skill heavy build, but it's also fairly easy to use for a roguelike. Lastly Dungeonmans doesn't have a particularly compelling level algorithim, generating samey dungeons with a lot of random empty space. Again, it's very similar to ToME, which has the same problem making interesting layouts, but at least in ToME you can mush autoexplore to speed through the more tedious dungeon designs. I know autoexplore is a controversal feature for roguelike makers, but a similar feature would make Dungeonmans almost perfect.

Still, even as is I'm a big fan. What really does it for me is the excessive hubris. Nearly every conversation with an NPC involves your character remarking about how they're going to live forever and crush the game in one go—"Well you know what they say, 14th time's the charm!" I cheerfully responded to the gravedigger. The most dangerous enemy in roguelikes is hubris, so I love how Dungeonmans doubles down on the inevitable cockiness that 99% of the time will get you killed.

EDIT TO ADD: I wrote this and three days later the devs launch a massive balancing patch. Am I going to try it again? Third time's the charm? Maybe, but in any case take this mildly outdated review with a grain of salt.

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There's really nothing original about Blue Fire. It's a Dark Souls world with a Hollow Knight aesthetic and Zelda dungeons strewn about with Mario Sunshine/Hat in Time platforming voids. And that's ok! A game can be very unoriginal and still be really good! But Blue Fire incorporates some of the worst aspects of each while missing what makes the inspirations work.

Dark Souls: Dark Souls is opaque, often frustratingly so. But the world is designed to keep looping you back to central hub areas with large features that draw your eye and hint at how to progress. In Blue Fire, I often wind up with two or three different paths, mostly identical looking, resulting in a lot of backtracking and repetition. It also suffers from the issue of most Souls knock-offs in having pretty boring environments, with the first four major areas just being different shades of spooky castle.

Hollow Knight: Hollow Knight has a lot of ultra precise precision platforming and tough bonus areas, which is a style of platforming that just frankly doesn't work in floaty 3D environments. There's a reason there aren't really any successful equivalents to Meat Boy or I Wanna Be The Guy in the third dimension, because the funnest 3D platformers need to accommodate a bit of wonky physics leeway. Needing to jump or slide or wall-jump in just the precise way is annoying as hell while also dealing with a frustrating camera right out of the N64 era.

Zelda: Creative dungeon design is hard! Zelda (usually) manages to get it just right; it has to be fun to explore, linear enough to prevent sequence breaking but open enough so the player feels like they have options on how to clear it. Here's an example of the kind of dungeon design I don't like in Blue Fire from the forest temple. You reach a T intersection. Left and straight are identical locked doors. Right is an ambush, with a chest, with a key. This key for whatever reason only works on the left door (there are holy keys and regular keys, and locks only take one or the other, except both key and lock look exactly the same, but that's a whole other design issue). Inside the left door is an ambush with the same enemies, giving access to another chest with another key. Now you open the centre door and inside is, guess what, an ambush with the same enemies, with the upgrade you need to progress. Including the T room itself, that's four rooms of not very compelling, unnecessarily linear padding that could have been either a tougher, more fun encounter or spread out for some non-linear exploration.

Mario/Hat: There's nothing more frustrating than finding a hidden void level and not being able to do it because you're missing some Metroidvania upgrade. Either you need to have your whole moveset from the get go (like Hat and most Marios) or you need to properly gate those areas behind obstacles that require the upgrade. It is way too easy to unintentionally sequence break Blue Fire and unintentionally sequence breaking a game feels real bad.

I really did not like Blue Fire and dropped it, came back with the new rift DLC, and dropped it again because, well, I still don't like it. There's a lot of good ingredients from some very good games, but it congeals into a really frustrating experience I just can't recommend.

I often refer to this style as "first person Science! puzzlers" and Superliminal sure is one. The good thing is that Superliminal ticks all the boxes: a cool gimmick, genuinely clever puzzles and a voice from above with a sense of humour. That's honestly good enough; I've recommended at least four other FP🧪!🧩s on less.

But that's a disservice to what makes Superliminal really, really cool. A common (albeit minor) issue in these games, even the best ones, is that the gameplay never really hooks into the story. Portal has a great story, but rogue AI doesn't really have all that much to do with portals. Talos Principle has some good writing, but tossing crates and lasers around with fans doesn't exactly scream philosophical transhumanist theology.

Superliminal has that aforementioned great gimmick (in this case, perspective), but bases its environments, writing, story, message, world-building—everything!—to make one dreamy, trippy experience. And even better is the way it does so through the mundane. There are weirder, dreamier games out there—Yume Nikki and LSD: Dream Emulator jump straight to mind—but Superliminal does it all with chess pieces and diet soda.

Dream-like puzzle games aren't always winners for me—I'm only so-so on Antichamber, which is probably the closest relative Superliminal has on Steam—but there's a certain weird logic and storytelling that places the game pretty high on my picks for the genre. It's nice and short and can easily be a one-afternoon experience, so there's really no excuse not to sit down and give Superliminal a go.

Ok, it's a pretty silly game. Yes it's very short. No, it's not particularly challenging. But there is something about chasing after spiders with a hairspray flamethrower that's a pile of fun.

I'm a big fan of escalation in video games, where you think a game can't top itself just before it does exactly that. The missions in Kill It With Fire definitely follow the pattern, moving from silly little rooms to complex environments jammed with moving pieces. The weapon progression also perfectly nails escalation absurdity, upgrading from household objects to army surplus and beyond. I could hardly wait to unlock each new, shinier, shootier toy.

Because that's what Kill It With Fire is: a toybox. The puzzles and goals are amusing enough and lead to some pretty hilarious levels, but it's ultimately about experimenting and playing in your dumb spider sandbox. I don't know if everyone is gonna appreciate this game, but I certainly appreciate Kill It With Fire, and that's what counts.

You should play ELDERBORN because it has a kick button. All games with kick buttons are excellent, and ELDERBORN has one of the most satisfying kicks since Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, the patron saint of kicking.

If kicks alone aren't enough and you need more to go on—weirdo—you should also play ELDERBORN because it's pretty damn great. The developers compare it to (takes a shot) Dark Souls, but it's really more like an Elder Scrolls game by way of DOOM—2016 DOOM in particular. Did you love stomping around Oblivion gates and crushing scamps with the heaviest stick possible to watch them hilariously ragdoll down the cliffs? That's ELDERBORN, basically.

Though to be clear, the combat is waaaay more compelling than anything Todd's ever given us. There's around 5 basic weapon types with variants of each (like DOOM and many clones) and each one a) feels good and b) has its place. Fast little jerks? Knock them silly with a well timed mace. Shielded cowards? Parry them with the spear and then open them up with the counterattack. Slow dumb idiots? Dart in and out with katar flurries. Hail of bullets? Block them all with your absurd buster sword, or parry them back with the right upgrade to really feel like the coolest fing person alive.

I did get a little turned around at times in the massive and nested levels. Unfortunately, like Oblivion gates and the mazier DOOM episodes, it's real easy to get lost, forget which keys go where, miss switches and what have you. It evens out a bit once you pass the caves—I started picking up on a lot of clever environmental clues in the more open spaces—but retracing your steps does dampen the feeling of being an bloody unstoppable blood juggernaut of blood.

Like Valfaris before it, I can't say the heavy metal aesthetic is quite my thing. But ELDERBORN is so ridiculously over the top that I could appreciate the feeling of hacking through the cover of a symphonic metal album. I'm always down for more games that play like undisputed classic Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, and ELDERBORN pretty perfectly fills that niche.

Only a two hour playtime? Is that enough time to form an opinion on a game? Haha, friend, you overestimate me. I've been trying out Halfway off and on for the last six years or so. My pattern: "Geez, this game looks cool, why haven't I played it?" followed by about half an hour, followed by "oh... right..." Four half-hours of starting new files makes me even less qualified to write a review, but hey! Halfway is frankly not for me and I don't need another six years of false starts to decide that.

I wasn't wrong though, this game does look cool. The pixel art uses a fairly unique cartoon military style that makes the alien horror theme work, like X-COM by way of Advance Wars. It's moody, there's a survival horror effort to build tension with limited supplies and the difficulty is through the roof.

That last point is where Halfway disagrees with me. Any X-COM vet knows that the accuracy estimate is a filthy, dirty lie, but Halfway takes things to a downright malicious level. Your weapon ranges are comically small with alpinely steep accuracy penalties, where even not moving and taking your full measly 2 AP to aim gives you a ~70% chance to hit (which a la X-COM feels more like a ~7%). Enemies swarm you, and you can bet they sure don't have the same issues. They can kite you around effortlessly, shrugging off more accurate melee hits and 420 no-scoping you from ten tiles away, even through your alleged 50% cover.

To be fair to Halfway, the game is equipped with Steam Workshop support, with a considerable number of mods devoted to rebalancing the game—usually by buffing your gear and stats. If you really like the mood and survival horror pacing of Halfway, there are ways to make the game playable beyond frustrating reloads to roll hard 6s.

But to be fair to me, there are a lot of other games out there to play, instead of mucking around with difficulty mods. I'm not saying Halfway needs multiple difficulties and gameplay tweaking built right in (though it'd be nice), but that as is the game is not at all balanced for a fun experience, at least for the average person. It just doesn't feel strategic; when it feels like smart play is discarded in favour of RNG chicanery, it's time for me to move on.

Well, this is awkward. I randomly fired up Shadows: Awakening without reading much on it. I had no idea it was developed by The Games Farm, the same crew that made Vikings: Battle for Midgard. Vikings, well, I didn't like very much. My review was a tortured pizza-based analogy that came down to "All action rpgs are fun. This is an action rpg, ergo it is fun. There are action rpgs that are more fun that you could and/or should play instead."

Once I heard the recycled UI twangs and player grunts in Shadows, though, it started to click. Had I known about the shared ancestry ahead of time, would I have started Shadows? Probably not. But it was already installed and pizza action-RPGs is are always tasty fun so I decided to give it a go anyway.

The verdict? Mostly better than Vikings. Still pretty middling.

Generic fantasy is more to my tastes so Shadows' archetypical fantasy desert setting worked better for me than Norse shenanigans. The keyboard controls are a lot less janky and characters don't get hung up targeting things, which is good because there's no controller support this time. There's a tiny bit more build customization, and I never had more skill points than skills to spend them on like before.

One issue with Vikings is that it included a lot of mechanics that sounded good in theory but weren't fun in practice—the same problem runs through Shadows. One gimmick lets you hotswap between characters mid battle, letting you equip your puppetmaster spirit-world demon with three stooges to act as your real world agents. In theory, very cool! Swapping between ARPG classes on the fly is a really neat feature that opens up cool combos and tactics. In practice, four characters makes gear and skill management four times as annoying, especially with the excruciating inventory UI.

Another example is the spirit world. Your demon protagonist is the only character that operates outside the material plane, with unique enemies and treasures. In theory, cool! It lets the game throw in little dimension swapping puzzles that are a step more interesting than breaking every barrel. In practice? The demon is definitely the least fun (yet most obligatory) character to play thanks to his janky, swooping attacks, and for completionists and treasure hunters you need to clear every map twice (or swap every corridor) to spot everything. Throw in that spirit enemies come through the walls and love hovering in spots you can't attack and it's just a pain.

There's aspects of Shadows: Awakening that are intriguing, just like there were parts of Vikings I liked—the dodge, for example, which is sadly missing here. There very well could be an amalgamated ARPG in the future of The Games Farm that will finally have more hits than misses for me. But with Shadows, perhaps unsurprisingly I have the same taste as Vikings—pizza is always good, but you can probably order a better pizza.

Lovecraft is kind of an odd slice of horror, because a decade of pop culture references and cuddly board game expansions have somewhat dulled the visceral horror of a big ol' squid-boy eating a planet. I've been DMing a cosmic horror campaign for the last six months or so, and I've given a lot of thought to what makes horror tick—particularly Lovecraftian horror.

Unfortunately it's not ticking so much in the arcadey Lovecraft's Untold Stories. Like any Lovecraft protagonist, the game seems a bit befuddled and maddened, pulling a mish-mash of trendy pseudo-roguelite mechanics into a spooky, roaring twenties twin-stick dungeon crawler. The problem is that these trendy mechanics don't quite fit into a spooky, roaring twenties setting.

Action-crawler (Gungeon, Isaac, Nuclear Throne, e.g.) game design is very much at odds with the slow burn of cosmic horror setting, which means Lovecraft's Untold Stories is doomed to disappoint. Examples? Well, you use the right stick to shoot! Cool, except your weapons are old timey boomsticks and the like, with some weird omnidirectional issues that don't feel good. Status effects like madness and bleeding are very punishing and need special treatment! Great, except this is an action game full of frequent combat and having an inventory full of fiddly junk is grating when you need to eat your damned antitoxin. Enemy design is really creepy and weird and cool! Ok, but having bloodrunes block every exit before you even see the monster somewhat dulls the impact of an encounter, turning it into an arena brawl rather than an encounter with unfathomable beings of darkness.

There's a reason many effective Lovecraftian games use little to no combat. Combat gives the player power, and power inoculates the player against the horror of the unknown... because they can just shoot the unknown. But an action dungeon crawler needs combat, which leaves these untold stories at an impasse.

One example here is the first boss. Going from rando cultists to a cosmic starspawn in one staircase isn't good cosmic horror pacing... at least slip in some Cats of Ulthar or a ghoul before you go full tentacle titan. It doesn't help the fight pins you in a hall right away and is brutally unfun, but the bigger problem is that nobody should punch out Cthulhu in chapter one, y'know?

I didn't make it much further into the second level. The game structure seems interesting (collect clues on various old ones, most of which are character or dungeon exclusive) but it's also a bit befuddling. Technically the game isn't actually a roguelite—dying just restarts you at the beginning of the level with your character state rewound—but it feels like it should be. As is, going through the exact same rooms again with the exact same enemies, encounters and treasures is a bit dull, which is particularly bad for that Lovecraft atmosphere.

Anyway, it might be fair to say I didn't give Lovecraft's Untold Stories enough of a chance—I'd suggest checking out other reviews if it seems like I'm unfairly writing the game off after an hour. There's some great ideas in the game—I liked the text based encounters with cursed objects, even if a lot of them were a bit "HEY REMEMBER CTHULHU?" It just feels like an odd genre mashup, and the structure and pacing are a little too loose to hook me into the madness.