Hardcore Casual

I shall now also post about Valheim, because that is what one blogs about these days. As one should, because out of the blue the game has come out and done what so many before it have failed to do; it captures the core of a genre while removing much of the suck, and doing so in a clean and enjoyable manner.

The easiest way to understand why playing Valheim is more fun than say, playing RUST or ARK is similar to how the combat and overall feel in WoW is better than EQ or similar games. Both sets of games do similar things and have their own details and differences, but Valheim/WoW just ‘feel’ smooth and clean. Hitting a skill off your hotbar in WoW is better than doing the exact same thing in EQ. The ‘why’ is complex and has been covered to death in the past, but the important part for today is that combat in Valheim just feels correct, where combat in RUST or ARK feels floaty and ‘off’ by comparison. That’s a huge deal when combat and general gameplay is, well, most of what you do.

Small details also add up. For example, in RUST/ARK you wake up naked and clueless and good luck figuring it all out. Note that both games have now been out for years. In Valheim you fly in via giant bird, and the area around you, while still part of the whole world, is designed with a new player in mind. A crow also appears early and often with tips on what to do and how to do it. The game has been out for less than a month. Oh, and it was made by two people. Why don’t RUST/ARK do this? Because you suffer and die because its survival, or something… I’m sure there was a point to it back in the day.

Unlike its peers, Valheim is a PvE game first. The point is to unlock and kill big bosses, while gearing up and killing ever increasingly difficult enemies as you explore the giant and procedural world (a quick note about the world generation; its insanely good, mostly avoiding creating things that don’t make sense or get you stuck). Why it took this long for someone to realize the potential of a full-on PvE ARK/RUST is beyond me, but its here and surprise, its super fun. While you can play solo, the game is far better with a small group of friends, and in another major “how is this early access done by two people?”, making your game open to others is both very easy and works like a charm. You can even have a paid hosting service keep your world online 24/7 (otherwise when the world host goes offline, others can’t join).

I won’t go into the details of everything you can do, but it has all of the basics. Build a base, upgrade and expand it, collect resources, explore, gain skills by doing things, die and corpse run, teraform, different weapons with different advantages/penalties, etc etc. Again, insane how much this game already has, and how well it all works.

The progression is very smooth, rarely is something critical lacking in an annoying way, and lots of small details make sense and are well thought-out. For example ore and metal bars can’t go through portals (fast travel), so while you can eventually fast travel around the world instead of repeatedly running back and forth, you DO need to plan major trips back when it comes to metal, which is a key progression resource. So you initially have travel for exploration, or shorter distances for local resources. Then you expand and unlock some fast travel to ‘shrink’ the world, but still must make the occasional trip via cart or boat for ore/metal. It just works, and is well thought-out.

The game is full of other examples of smart design. Of things that challenge you but aren’t annoying. The game is just a joy to play, and especially with others. For $20 its the biggest steal in gaming right now. Can’t recommend highly enough!

If there is an award for cleanest design to achieve it’s goal, Mini Metro wins it. When you first load the game up, you are taken directly into the first map. No intro screen, no main menu, no tutorial section; just right into the game (with tooltips to help you along). And it works, because Mini Metro is exactly what you would expect it to be; you connect stations and transport people (well, symbols, more on that in a bit).

Things start nice and slow, three stations, low population. As the game progresses, more and more stations pop up in random locations, and you are given more trains, train lines, tunnels, and other bonuses to build your network. You lose when any one station overflows with people.

Each station in the game has a symbol, and the train raiders in the game are also symbols. A square ‘person’ wants to go to a square station. The odd/unrealistic part is that any square station will do, but once you know this, you can more fully begin to build successful setups (I was initially expecting people to want to go to one specific station, so my early designs failed horribly). The other negative is you can unrealistically min/max things without issue; you can for example pull an empty train from one line and place it directly on a station that is busy, have it deliver what it needs, and pull it off again. Same goes for train lines; delete or edit them as much as you want, instantly, with no cost/penalty.

That said I’ve been able to ignore those faults and still very much enjoy the game as a fun puzzler. It’s very easy to pick up for a couple tries in say 30 minutes time. There are currently plenty of different maps, and the replay-ability is very high per-map due to the random nature of it all. For its usually discounted price of $5, its a worthwhile pickup.

Mini review of Foundations as the game is still in Early Access (aren’t they all), and also because its a medieval city builder with all of the basics you would expect from such a game.

Foundations has two things going for it that stand out, one more so than the other. The big standout is that cities tend to grow more naturally than in other sims, because while you can directly place production buildings, homes are built somewhat randomly in a residential area you paint on the map. As citizens walk to where they need to go, a road forms, and future citizens will walk on that road rather then a more direct path. This in turn leads you to build around said road. It works, and makes cities look and feel more natural.

The other feature is the ability to build monuments and larger buildings, like a keep, church, or lords manor, piece by piece. This not only gives you flexibility in how they look, but the bigger you make them, the more they benefit you. A bigger church can hold more people, while a larger lords manor lets you hire a tax collector, have a larger treasury, and gives you more prestige.

The biggest pain-point with the game right now is the UI; its horrible. Luckily the next big update is a UI overhaul, hopefully coming in Jan or Feb. Other than that the game runs well and I didn’t encounter any bugs. It’s not ultra-deep right now, but if you are looking for a city builder, both for now and for the future, Foundations has promise.

I finally purchased The Long Dark after it had been sitting on my wishlist for a few years. Before playing it, my view of it was that it was a stylized survival game that may or may not be interesting to me, hence why it sat so long without being purchased.

Having now played it, I was both correct AND wrong in terms of what The Long Dark is, and my enjoyment level of it. The first time I loaded it up I played the story-focused episode mode, but about 30 minutes into it I wasn’t enjoying it so stopped that and went into the more sandbox survival mode. About an hour into survival I wasn’t enjoying that either, but playing that mode did make me more curious about the story so I went back to episode mode. I ended up finishing all 3 available episodes (parts 4 and 5 are coming in 2021 I believe), which took about 25 hours. I have now been playing the survival mode for another 20ish hours.

The Long Dark is as pure a survival game as I have played. The need to stay hydrated, fed, and rested are not just requirements, they are basically the ONLY requirements, and the entire goal of the survival mode is to see how long you can go until you run out of food/water/health and die. It’s because of this that I initially didn’t see the point of playing survival; since the first few days on the lower difficulty level were very easy, and it felt like I was just wandering around to wander and collect more stuff that I didn’t seem to need. And since you are the only human alive in survival, the feeling of loneliness kicks in fast (which is the point in some ways, of course).

The more story/mission focused episodes serve as a very nice tutorial for both the gameplay aspects and the world setting, while still mostly revolving around the core gameplay loop of staying alive and exploring to gather things that help you stay alive. The story itself is interesting, more-so IMO than most video-game stories. You aren’t reading a books-worth of text here or anything, but who you meet and the overarching plot is really solid.

Once the episode content was complete, I had a solid understanding of how the mechanics worked, and wanted to go back into survival mode on a higher difficulty to apply that understanding. This also clicked, and I got into a good loop of exploring and surviving. Of finding better clothing to stay warm, and new/better tools to help in exploration. And slowly your character gets better at the basics, like starting a fire or having the stamina to go on without needing as much rest.

The Long Dark does some things exceptionally well. For starters, the weather in the game is the most impactful weather I have seen. Visually a blizzard or fog greatly reduces what you can see, while from a gameplay perspective harsh winds drop your warmth fast, and make walking into the wind much slower. Snow leaves your clothing wet and will eventually freeze. The night is colder than the day. Combine it all and a clear day to explore in feels like a bonus, while getting caught out in a blizzard at night is panic-inducing and brings a real sense of dread.

I like the art style a lot as well. There are some very rough textures at times, the animations can be a little stilted, and overall this isn’t the next Crysis by any means, but everything looks ‘right’ when you are out in the woods, surrounded by snow, trees, and the occasional animal. The game places you in the designed setting very well, and nothing ever really feels ‘off’ to break that immersion.

The Long Dark is a hard game to recommend because it is so unique. There is little combat (mostly shooting wolves and bears with one of three weapons), no building, limited character progression, and a pure and singular focus on survival. But it does what it sets out to do extremely well, and again for me personally it did click, and has become a really enjoyable game.